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Neophilologus (2008) 92:205215
DOI 10.1007/s11061-007-9068-6
John Beston
Published online: 25 September 2007 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007
Abstract While the charge of being a plagiarism is no longer leveled at Galeran de Bretagne, that charge damaged it, so that it has not been appreciated as an original poem with a serious theme of its own. Galeran is infused with traditional Christian values in reection of Renauts own. Most simply, it is an exploration of the growth to maturity of two young people in order to live life with honor and dignity. Renauts religious cast of mind continually leads him away from the romance conventions of his time towards an everyday realism, so that Galeran occupies a unique place among the long narrative poems of his time, between romance and realism.
Galeran de Bretagne was written by Jean Renaut at the beginning of the thirteenth century.1 It is not quite true that we know nothing about Renaut, that was den Galerandichter betrifft, so fehlen uns leider jegliche Anhaltspunkte ber seine Person und sein Leben.2 He was probably attached to the court of la Roche-Guyon shortly after the castle was completed by Guy de la Roche around 1200.3 Renaut would have enhanced Guys pride in his new and powerful castle, adding to the
1 Lucien Foulet in his edition of Galeran de Bretagne (1925) attributed the authorship to Jean Renart, a contemporary of Renaut, but the attribution is no longer accepted. All quotations from Galeran in this article are from the Foulet edition.
2 Dubs (1949, p. 10).
3 The Larousse des Chteaux (2005) states that Cest vers 11901200 que Guy de la Roche...fait construire une nouvelle forteresse sur le plateau dominant le site de lancien chteau troglodytique.
J. Beston
Department of English, Nazareth College of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA
J. Beston (&)1/6 Beachside Court, Sapphire Beach, 2450 NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected]
Galeran de Bretagne: Between Romance and Realism
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cultural prestige of his court. He would have repaid Guys patronage by promoting la Roche-Guyon, where Galeran begins and ends, and by suggesting a highly attering representation of Guy through the personage of Brundor, the greatly respected lord of la Roche-Guyon in the poem. We should assume that Renaut was an established poet, for...