Four Arthurian Romances -Lancelot-: Four Medieval Romances of Lancelot, Yvain, Cligés, and Erec & Enide - Hardcover

Four Arthurian Romances: Lancelot brings together Chrétien de Troyes's foundational medieval romances of chivalry, courtly love, adventure, and Arthurian legend. This edition includes Erec et Enide, Cligés, Yvain, and Lancelot, four major Old French narratives from the second half of the twelfth century. They belong among the essential sources for the literary development of King Arthur's court, knightly quest, romantic devotion, honour, testing, and the imaginative world of medieval European romance. Project Gutenberg's source text identifies the collection as Four Arthurian Romances: "Erec et Enide," "Cligés," "Yvain," and "Lancelot", originally written in Old French by Chrétien de Troyes in the later twelfth century.

The commercial strength here is the Lancelot and Arthurian pathway, but the edition should not be made to look like modern fantasy. Chrétien's romances are classical medieval literature: elegant, symbolic, courtly, adventurous, and central to the formation of later Arthurian tradition. Lancelot, also known as The Knight of the Cart, is especially important for the development of Lancelot as a major Arthurian figure and for the literary treatment of love, loyalty, disgrace, and knightly identity. Read together, these four romances give students, Arthurian readers, medieval literature readers, and classic fiction buyers a substantial single-volume encounter with one of the great origin points of the Arthurian imagination.