ABSTRACT
The final chapter of this book explores the relationship between Pierart's production. While adopting Stephen Greenblatt's approach of examining "the embeddedness of cultural objects in the contingencies of history". The author also addresses Greenblatt's own "blind spot" concerning the significance of the illuminated manuscript. The abolition of clerical marriage and the suppression of all sexual activity among the clergy were major aims of the eleventh-century church reform movement. In The Mystic Vision in the Grail Legend and in the Divine Comedy, Lizette Andrews Fisher argues that the emphasis on virginity in the Grail romances raises the larger question of the celibacy of those who celebrate the mass and thus participate in the mystery of transubstantiation. In recent years critics of the Middle Ages have questioned the notion of a stable "text" of a work, pointing out that medieval textuality is characterized by mouvance, the shifting of textual parameters, and thus a work's meaning, within the context of different manuscripts.
