ABSTRACT

Intended as "the other bookend" to Jessie Weston's work some eighty years earlier, this essay collection provides a careful overview of recent scholarship on possible overlap between Arthurian literature and Christianity. From Ritual to romance and Notes, taken together, bracket contemporary inquiry into the relationship (if any) between Jesus and Arthur. T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is here regarded as one strand joining this matter to many a recent literary riddle (such as the meaning of the term "postmodernism"). Without reprinting work readily available elsewhere and no longer subject to revision through dialogue with fellow contributors, Notes attempts to do justice to all sides in twentieth century exploration of christianity's contribution to an art form which is also grounded in early European polytheism ("paganism").

chapter |18 pages

CHAPTER 3 From Germanic Warrior to Christian Knight

The Heliand Transformation

chapter |31 pages

CHAPTER 4 Romancing the Grail

Fiction and Theology in the Queste del Saint Graal

chapter |18 pages

CHAPTER 6 The Allegory of Adventure

An Approach to Chrétien's Romances 1

chapter |21 pages

CHAPTER 9 Lady Love, King, Minstrel

Courtly Depictions of Jesus or God in Late-Medieval Vernacular Mystical Literature