The Library in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century French Literature: Benoît de Sainte-Maure'sRoman de Troie, Chrétien de Troyes'sCligès, and Adenet le Roi'sBerte as grans piés

What is it about?

The allusion to a real or imaginary source is a well-known commonplace in medieval literature; however, some writers take this reference to sources a stage further and speak about the discovery of a work in a library or book collection, occasionally evoking particular place names or locations. If the library in such instances elaborates upon a common motif, it also raises the issue of the imaginative work that this elaboration might perform, raising questions about the historical conceptualization of book collections and the relationship to knowledge they connote. Insofar as it features in more modern discussions, the library as a figure or metaphor has been commonly thought about in connection with periods subsequent to the Middle Ages, often being associated with the organization or throwing into chaos of systems of knowledge. This article considers how the library as it appears in twelfth- and thirteenth- century francophone literature offers alternative ways of imagining hierarchies of knowledge from those associated with modernity and post-modernity, ways which are less concerned with systems of classification or notions of ordered space than with relationships among writers, readers, and texts.

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