ABSTRACT
In Gauvain in Old French Literature Keith Busby1 treats an extensive corpus of works dealing with the figure of Gauvain which appeared in the wake of the romances of Chrétien de Troyes. The great interest in this character, however, was not limited to individual texts. The person ultimately responsible for producing the thirteenth-century Chantilly MS 4722 seemed to make a conscious attempt to create a multi-branch romance centered upon Gauvain. Thirteenth-century romancers either developed the tendency to view Gauvain with a critical eye implicit in the later romances of Chrétien de Troyes or tried to restore him to the glorious position he had occupied in Erec et Enide as well as in the works of Wace and Geoffrey of Monmouth.3 The texts in MS 472, which include three of Chrétien’s own narratives, reflect these trends. The conceptualizer sought to give the “full story” of Gauvain: a drawn-out portrait complete with family history. Like a typical multi-branch work, MS 472 is organized along the principle of narrative interlace. The adventures of Gauvain alternate with those of other knights on the level of the individual text and on that of the manuscript as a whole.
