ABSTRACT
At the beginning of his first excursion into Arthurian Romance, Roger Sherlaw Loomis evoked a picture of medieval crusading knights biding their time en route to the Holy Land, listening in some Italian baronial hall to a Breton conteur telling the kind of story about the abduction of Guinevere that soon found expression in stone on the archivolt of the cathedral at Modena, with the names of Arthur, Gawain and others clearly picked out.1 The implication was that that sort of performance offered the social context in which we most naturally imagine the propagation and transmission of material about King Arthur.
