The Multilingual Tradition of Arthurian Texts in European Text Culture

The cultural and linguistic history of the Matter of Britain between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is a vast subject to broach, even if we were to limit ourselves to the field of literature. The area of production, circulation, and reception of Arthurian stories covers all Western Europe, with considerable offshoots reaching into the Balkans, Greece, the Mediterranean basin and the Levant. This expansion in space makes it difficult to study the language of the authors and works, textual transmission, and the translations, with their complex phenomena of inherent interference and stratigraphy. Moreover, one should not forget that these phenomena form but a subgroup, central as it may be, of the Arthurian semiosphere, which encompasses much more: names, genealogies, heraldry, imagery, in short, entire chunks of medieval life. This paper will not directly examine extra-literary facts, but they should remain a constant background feature of the current study as they form a sort of lattice framework on which our reconstruction of the Arthurian imagination, and thus the history of its structures, rests.