Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgement
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Pierre sala, Poacher
- 2 ‘Books Printed Here’: The Business of the Print Shop
- 3 ‘A condition of survival’: Lancelot and Tristan
- 4 ‘Skimble-Skamble Stuff’: Meliadus, Merlin, Greaal
- 5 ‘Imperious Seductions’: Giglan and Perceval
- 6 ‘Satyric Scenes in Landscape style’: Amadis de Gaule
- 7 ‘Fruitlesse Historie’: Maugin's Tristan, Rigaud's Lancelot
- Afterword
- Appendix 1 Rough chronology of Publication
- Appendix 2 Sainct Greaal (1516) v. Vulgate Queste
- Appendix 3 Structure of the Roman de Giglan
- Bibliography
- Index
- Already Published
1 - Pierre sala, Poacher
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgement
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Pierre sala, Poacher
- 2 ‘Books Printed Here’: The Business of the Print Shop
- 3 ‘A condition of survival’: Lancelot and Tristan
- 4 ‘Skimble-Skamble Stuff’: Meliadus, Merlin, Greaal
- 5 ‘Imperious Seductions’: Giglan and Perceval
- 6 ‘Satyric Scenes in Landscape style’: Amadis de Gaule
- 7 ‘Fruitlesse Historie’: Maugin's Tristan, Rigaud's Lancelot
- Afterword
- Appendix 1 Rough chronology of Publication
- Appendix 2 Sainct Greaal (1516) v. Vulgate Queste
- Appendix 3 Structure of the Roman de Giglan
- Bibliography
- Index
- Already Published
Summary
Readers are travellers; they pass through lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves.
One summer in about 1510, an apparently unremarkable civil servant called Pierre Sala tells us, he found himself in Grenoble, in the train of King Louis XII – and was intrigued.2 Not far away, he knew, a mere twenty miles or so, was a most strange and noteworthy site, an estrange assiete: the Carthusian monastery known as the Grande Chartreuse, perched remotely and spectacularly in the mountains of the Dauphiné. It was not, he knew, easy of access – yet the way was even more saulvaige, the monastery even more austere, than he had expected. Even though it was June, there was still snow drifted in the cloisters; he was frozen (je cuydey mourir de froyt) and forced into a quick retreat. But rather than scurry back to Grenoble and the warmth of the valley, he took advantage of the opportunity to make another tourist visit, this one involving his forcing a way through something called the Passaige Affreux – so affreux, so dangerous, he says, that no one who has not been there can imagine how terrifying it is, a grant poyne pourroit l'on croire que c'est But the temptation was irresistible: it took him, he tells us, to
le Lac du Bourget qui est celuy propre ou le terrible chat fut pesché dont Merlin parla. Je avoye moult grant desir de voyr le lieu ou le roy Artus l’avoit combatu.
[the Lake of Bourget which is the very lake from which was fished the terrible Cat of whom Merlin spoke. I was most eager to see the spot where King Arthur had engaged it in combat.]
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rewriting Arthurian Romance in Renaissance FrancePublishing from Manuscript to Book, pp. 11 - 37Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014