The Labyrinth

Please note: for this meeting we are only covering II Kings.

In our fourth year, after working through most of the Greek and Latin material the group wishes to cover, we arrive at The Bible.

Before mutiny, as a group, we decided the following:

1. A natural point to begin to cover the literature of The Bible is after the classical Latin period and as we begin to dive into literature, epics, and poetry of the Dark and Middle Ages.
2. We are not going to read The Bible straight through. We'll cover select books with disproportionate literary merit and influence. We'll jump back to The Bible once every 3-4 months so that we can cover it, slowly, while progressing through the medieval period in tandem. For instance, we'll read Genesis and Exodus but we'll surely skip meetings on Leviticus and Numbers. We'll allow time for those who wish to get a full Bible read in, cover-to-cover, including the books we do not discuss, over a few years.
3. To be clear, the meetings on The Bible aren't intended to be spiritual or religious. We'll strive to understand and appreciate the Bible in a more literary and artistic way. Religion, history, and spirituality will inevitably come up, but this isn't the main point of the meetings.
4. We decided that as a baseline, there should be no baseline, and people should read a version of The Bible they are interested in.

I'm going to work from a New Cambridge King James Version edited by David Norton:
https://a.co/d/6KLzXdM

There are several versions of The Bible available online, including on Gutenberg and the Internet Archive.

The actual name of the author, now known as Marie de France, is unknown; she adopted this nom de plume from a line in one of her published works: "Marie ai num, si sui de France," which translates as "My name is Marie, and I am from France. Common suggestions for the identity of this 12th-century poet are Marie of France, Countess of Champagne; Marie, Abbess of Shaftesbury and half-sister to Henry II, King of England; Marie, Abbess of Reading; Marie I of Boulogne; Based on evidence from her writings, it is clear that, despite being born in France, she spent much of her life living in England.

Marie de France's Lais prefigured Arthurian romance by featuring courtly love, knights, and the supernatural. Her writings also provide a distinctly female perspective, questioning the values of male-centered chivalry. By establishing early versions of these elements, her work, such as Lanval, laid the groundwork for later, more complex Arthurian narratives by introducing foundational characters and themes that would be further developed in the 12th and 13th centuries.

Very exciting to kick off our Arthurian cycle. We'll read all of the major works and decide together if we want to fill in some minor Arthurian works and histories. I'm posting this for Tuesday, to avoid a meeting on Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

All of Marie de France's Lais are contained within this Penguin Classics volume. Let's read them all (about 70 pages) and we'll decide how to tackle them when we meet:
https://a.co/d/3qnx9kT

Guigemar
Equitan
Le Fresne
Bisclavret
Lanval
Les Deux Amanz
Yonec
Laustic
Milun
Chaitivel
Chevrefoil
Eliduc

Here is a link to her writing on Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11417/pg11417.txt

For this meeting, we'll read:
Erec and Enide (85 pages)
Cliges (82 pages)

Chrétien de Troyes (1160–1191) was a French poet and trouvère known for his writing on Arthurian subjects such as Gawain, Lancelot, Perceval, and the Holy Grail. Chrétien's chivalric romances, including Erec and Enide, Lancelot, Perceval, and Yvain, represent some of the best-regarded works of medieval literature. His use of structure, particularly in Yvain, has been seen as a step toward the modern novel.

Little is known of his life, but he seems to have been from Troyes or at least intimately connected with it. Between 1160 and 1172 he served (perhaps as herald-at-arms, as Gaston Paris speculated) at the court of his patroness Marie of France, Countess of Champagne, daughter of King Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine, who married Count Henry I of Champagne in 1164. Later, he served the court of Philippe d'Alsace, Count of Flanders. As proposed by Urban T. Holmes III, Chrétien's name, meaning literally "Christian from Troyes", might be a pen name moniker of a Jewish convert from Judaism to Christianity, also known as Crestien li Gois.

Chrétien's works include five major poems in rhyming eight-syllable couplets. Four of these are complete: Erec and Enide (1170); Cligès (1176); Yvain, the Knight of the Lion; and Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, the latter two written simultaneously between 1177 and 1181. Yvain is generally considered Chrétien's most masterful work. The last romance commonly attributed to Chrétien, Perceval, the Story of the Grail, was written between 1181 and 1190, but left unfinished. It is dedicated to Philip, Count of Flanders, to whom Chrétien may have been attached in his last years. He finished only 9,000 lines of the work, but four successors of varying talents added 54,000 additional lines in what are known as the Four Continuations. Similarly, the last thousand lines of Lancelot were written by Godefroi de Leigni, apparently by arrangement with Chrétien. In the case of Perceval, one continuer says the poet's death prevented him from completing the work; in the case of Lancelot, no reason is given. This has not stopped speculation that Chrétien did not approve of Lancelot's adulterous subject (in which case he seems unlikely to have invented Lancelot).

There are also several lesser works, not all of which can be securely ascribed to Chrétien. Philomela is the only one of his four poems based on Ovid's Metamorphoses that has survived. Two short-lyric chansons on the subject of love are also very likely his, but the attribution of the pious romance Guillaume d'Angleterre to him is now widely doubted. It has also been suggested that Chrétien might be the author of two short verse romances, Le Chevalier à l'épée and La Mule sans frein, but this theory has not found much support.

https://a.co/d/9hydGlc

Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/831/pg831.txt

For this meeting, we'll read:
The Knight of the Cart - Lancelot (87 pages)
The Knight with the Lion - Yvain (85 pages)

Chrétien de Troyes (1160–1191) was a French poet and trouvère known for his writing on Arthurian subjects such as Gawain, Lancelot, Perceval, and the Holy Grail. Chrétien's chivalric romances, including Erec and Enide, Lancelot, Perceval, and Yvain, represent some of the best-regarded works of medieval literature. His use of structure, particularly in Yvain, has been seen as a step toward the modern novel.

Little is known of his life, but he seems to have been from Troyes or at least intimately connected with it. Between 1160 and 1172 he served (perhaps as herald-at-arms, as Gaston Paris speculated) at the court of his patroness Marie of France, Countess of Champagne, daughter of King Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine, who married Count Henry I of Champagne in 1164. Later, he served the court of Philippe d'Alsace, Count of Flanders. As proposed by Urban T. Holmes III, Chrétien's name, meaning literally "Christian from Troyes", might be a pen name moniker of a Jewish convert from Judaism to Christianity, also known as Crestien li Gois.

Chrétien's works include five major poems in rhyming eight-syllable couplets. Four of these are complete: Erec and Enide (1170); Cligès (1176); Yvain, the Knight of the Lion; and Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, the latter two written simultaneously between 1177 and 1181. Yvain is generally considered Chrétien's most masterful work. The last romance commonly attributed to Chrétien, Perceval, the Story of the Grail, was written between 1181 and 1190, but left unfinished. It is dedicated to Philip, Count of Flanders, to whom Chrétien may have been attached in his last years. He finished only 9,000 lines of the work, but four successors of varying talents added 54,000 additional lines in what are known as the Four Continuations. Similarly, the last thousand lines of Lancelot were written by Godefroi de Leigni, apparently by arrangement with Chrétien. In the case of Perceval, one continuer says the poet's death prevented him from completing the work; in the case of Lancelot, no reason is given. This has not stopped speculation that Chrétien did not approve of Lancelot's adulterous subject (in which case he seems unlikely to have invented Lancelot).

There are also several lesser works, not all of which can be securely ascribed to Chrétien. Philomela is the only one of his four poems based on Ovid's Metamorphoses that has survived. Two short-lyric chansons on the subject of love are also very likely his, but the attribution of the pious romance Guillaume d'Angleterre to him is now widely doubted. It has also been suggested that Chrétien might be the author of two short verse romances, Le Chevalier à l'épée and La Mule sans frein, but this theory has not found much support.

https://a.co/d/9hydGlc

Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/831/pg831.txt