Our books have taught us that chivalry and learning first flourished in Greece; then to Rome came chivalry, and the sum of knowledge, which now has come to France. May God grant that they be maintained here…]

This movement implies a significant desire to bring literature and learning to those with little or no knowledge of Latin. That many were engaged in this undertaking is clear from the testimony of Chrétien’s contemporary, Marie de France, writing in the general prologue to her Lais that she ‘began to think of working on some good story and translating a Latin text into French, but this would scarcely have been worthwhile, for others have undertaken a similar task’ (The Lais of Marie de France 1986, p. 41). The earliest romances, the so-called romances of Antiquity – the Roman d’Eneas, Roman de Thèbes, and Roman de Troie – were adaptations respectively of Virgil’s Aeneid, Statius’s Thebaid, and the late Latin Troy narrative attributed to Darys and Dictys. Ovid’s tales of Narcissus and Piramus and Thishe were also done into Old French at this same time. This early period of French literature likewise witnessed the translation of religious treatises, sermons, and books of proverbial wisdom, as well as a number of saints’ lives. The evidence of a thirst for every sort of knowledge is provided by the many scientific and didactic works that appeared in French for the first time in the twelfth century: lapidaries, herbals, bestiaries, lunaries, Mirrors for Princes, and encyclopaedic works of all kinds.

Chrétien’s prologues, as well as numerous allusions in his poems, offer ample proof of his familiarity with this material. In the prologue to The Story of the Grail he compares the generosity of his patron to that of the great Alexander. This same romance contains a reference to the loves of Aeneas and Lavinia, an affair that is given more play in the Old French Roman d’Eneas than in Virgil’s Aeneid. In Cligés Chrétien compares King Arthur’s wealth to Alexander’s and Caesar’s, and notes the similarities between Alis’s and Alexander’s situation and that of Eteocles and Polynices in the Roman de Thèbes. Also in Cligés, he compares Thessala’s knowledge of magic with that of the legendary Medea and alludes to Paris’s abduction of Helen of Troy, which was played out in the Roman de Troie. In The Knight of the Cart, he mentions the tragic love tale of Piramus and Thisbe. Erec, his first romance, is however the richest in classical allusions, for there we find references to Alexander, Caesar, Dido, Aeneas, Lavinia, Helen and Solomon, as well as to the late Latin writer Macrobius.

In moving from doing translations to composing original works on non-Classical themes, Chrétien was merely emulating a popular twelfth-century tendency. Beginning early in the century, there was a great creative movement that saw the appearance of a number of forms and works that had no Latin antecedents. The first original Old French genre to flourish was the chanson de geste, which featured epic themes generally centred around the court and times of Charlemagne. In MS Bibl. Nat f. fr. 24403, Chrétien’s Erec is curiously bracketed by two chansons de geste: Garin de Montglane and Ogier le Danois. Chrétien’s comparison of Yvain’s skill in battle to that of the legendary Roland (ll. 3239–41) is good proof of his knowledge of the most famous of the chansons de geste. And Chrétien, as we have seen, practised the other great original genre of the twelfth century, the courtly lyric. While lyric poetry certainly existed in Latin, a wholly different inspiration informs the love-lyrics of the southern French troubadours. In their poetry love becomes an art and an all-subsuming passion. The lady becomes a person to be cherished, a source of poetic and personal inspiration, rather than simply a pawn in the game of heredity.

The love tradition of the southern French troubadours moved northward in the second third of the twelfth century as a result of political developments, especially the two marriages of Eleanor of Aquitaine, first to King Louis VII of France in 1137 and then in 1152 to the future Henry II of England. With her she brought a number of courtiers and poets who introduced the southern tradition of ‘courtly love’ into the more sober North. Her daughters, Marie de Champagne and Alis de Blois, were both important arbiters of taste and style like their more illustrious mother, and fostered literary activities of many kinds, in both Latin and the vernacular, in their central French courts.

The very notion of ‘courtly love’ (or fin’amors) as it was practised and celebrated in medieval literature remains even today a complex and vexed question. As it is depicted in troubadour poetry, the Tristan story and Chrétien’s The Knight of the Cart, it is an adulterous passion between persons of high social rank, in which the lovers express their profoundest emotions in a highly charged and distinctly stylized language. Both lovers agonize over their condition, indulging in penetrating self-examination and reflections on the nature of love.