Although the refinement of the language gives the love an ethereal quality it is sensual and non-Platonic in nature, and for his sufferings the lover hopes for and generally receives a frankly sexual recompense. This, at any rate, is love as it appears in The Knight of the Cart. But was such love actually practised in the courts of twelfth-century France? Here critics are loosely divided into two opposing camps: the realists, who believe that such an institution did exist in the Middle Ages and is faithfully reflected in the literature of the period; and the idealists, who believe that it is a post-Romantic critical construct and was, in the Middle Ages, at most a game to be taken lightly and ironically.

In The Knight of the Cart, Lancelot seems to substitute a religion of love for the traditional Christian ethic, even going so far as to genuflect upon leaving Guinevere’s bedchamber. Yet nowhere is there any direct condemnation of his behaviour, either by the characters or the narrator. Realists see in Lancelot the epitome of the courtly lover. For them, Marie de Champagne was a leading proponent of the doctrine of fin’amors, which was practised extensively at her court. To illustrate and further this concept, she commissioned Andreas Capellanus to draw up the rules for love in his De arte honeste amnandi and her favourite poet, Chrétien, to compose a romance whose central theme was to be that of the perfect courtly-love relationship. But Chrétien never completed his romance, an indication perhaps that he was not in sympathy with the theme proposed to him by the Countess.

Idealists agree that the subject matter of The Knight of the Cart did not appeal to Chrétien, but allege different reasons. Citing the fact that adultery was harshly condemned by the medieval Church, they argue that what we today call ‘courtly love’ would have been recognized as idolatrous and treasonable passion. Lancelot must be seen as a foolled on by his lust, rather than his reason, into ever more ridiculous and humiliating situations. The idea of Lancelot lost in thoughts of love and being unceremoniously unhorsed or duelling behind his back to keep Guinevere in view could only be seen as ludicrous.

Most realists today will concede a degree of ironic humour in the portrayal of Lancelot, but contend that the question of morality is a moot one: the love is amoral, rather than immoral. Sensitive to the attacks of the idealists, they now downplay the importance of Andreas Capellanus, whose concept of ‘pure love’ has led many commentators astray, and stress the distinctions between periods and works. The love portrayed by Dante or in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess is of another period and qualitatively different from that of the troubadours and trouvères. Indeed, love in the poems of the northern French trouvères is itself distinct from that of the troubadours. And love as it is portrayed in the other romances by Chrétien is different from that in The Knight of the Cart. In all his other romances he appears as an advocate for marriage and love within marriage, constructing Erec, Cligés and The Knight with the Lion around this theme, and showing in all the disadvantages of other types of relationships.

Not only do Chrétien’s prologues give us invaluable information about the poet himself, they also tell us a great deal about how he viewed his role as artist. In the prologue to Erec, Chrétien tells us that he tret d’un conte d’avanture/une molt bele conjointure (‘from a tale of adventure/he draws a beautifully ordered composition’). This conjointure has been variously translated ‘arrangement’, ‘linking’, ‘coherent organization’, ‘internal unity’, etc., but always implies that Chrétien has moulded and organized materials that were only inchoate before he applied his artistry to them. Already in his first romance, and repeatedly in his later work, Chrétien shows himself to be conscious of his role as a literary artist, a ‘maker’ or ‘inventor’ who fashions and gives artistic expression to materials that have come to him from earlier sources.

In speaking of un conte d’avanture in the singular and with the article, Chrétien implies that he conceived of his source as a single work, rather than as a collection of disparate themes or motifs. He goes on to inform us that other storytellers, the professional jongleurs who earn their living by performing such narrative poems before the public, were wont to depecier et corronpre (‘mangle and corrupt’) these tales. Chrétien, on the other hand, clearly implies that he has provided a coherent structure for his tale, a structure that most critics today agree is that of a triptych. Like the traditional triptych altarpiece, Chrétien’s Erec and Enide has a broad central panel flanked by two balanced side-panels. The first panel, which Chrétien refers to as li premiers vers (‘the first movement’, l. 1808), comprises ll. 27–1808 and weaves together the episodes of the Hunt of the White Stag and the Joust for the Sparrow-hawk. The final episode, known as the Joy of the Court, forms an analogous panel of approximately the same length as the first, ll. 5321–6912. The central panel of his triptych, ll. 1809–5320, is by far the largest and most important, covering the principal action of the poem.

Erec, like the other romances that followed with the exception of Cligés, was arranged around the motif of the quest. In each of his romances Chrétien varied the nature and organization of the central quest.