The beginnings of the European novel: Chrétien de Troyes’ *Lancelot* (Ordinario)

Chrétien de Troyes is the 12th-century french author who, more than any other, laid the structural, psychological and narrative foundations – through his verse novels – for the development of the genre that would come to dominate European culture. In particular, *Le Chevalier de la charrette* (*Lancelot*) is the work that introduces into the Arthurian world the symbolic figure of chivalric perfection and courtly love. In the first part of the course the study of this seminal text will focus in particular on its style, its sources and the work’s reception.

The second part will address the textual issues surrounding Lancelot. The immediate success of Chrétien de Troyes’s novels led to extensive copying, of which few manuscript examples remain. The high number of variants that characterise them – often of a creative nature – poses a philological problem that remains unresolved, 150 years after the first critical edition. Tracing the editorial history of *Lancelot* will lead us to grapple with delicate methodological issues and to question the relationship between the ‘author’s truth’ and the ‘copyist’s truth’.