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A selection of medieval French wisdom:

“When a man fails to honour ladies, his own honour must be dead.�

“Any wise man fears open spitefulness, whether it be in seriousness or in jest.�

“The dead with the dead, the living with the living.�

“Fortune has hair in front but is bald behind.�

“How wretched is the man who sees the perfect opportunity and still waits for a better one.�

Chrètian's intentions for the revelation of the mysteries of the Holy Grail can't be known due to his ill grace in dying before completing his story. I like his setup, and don't think the Continuations quite capture his genius, enjoyable additions though they are.
There are layers of meaning: in this reading what struck me most is the repetition of situations and behaviours, as Perceval closes in on the mysteries, and is either distracted by 👇�

Finished the Continuation of Gerbert de Montreuil, which is quite repetitive & ends exactly where the 2nd Continuation left off, with Perceval having witnessed the Grail Procession & about to ask the Grail Questions. As there's 31 pages to go, I'm assuming the answers won't be immediately given!
Gerbert was a professional minstrel & coincidentally minstrels get good press in his part of the story. I'm enjoying this, but glad to be on the last leg.

I've finished Chrètian's "Perceval", left incomplete circa 1185 when he died, & on to the anonymously written First Continuation. I can well understand why there was an appetite for the story to be continued, as the mystery of the Grail ceremony was not revealed by Chrétian, nor the outcome of various other adventures. Nobody likes a show to be cancelled when plot threads are still hanging! "Perceval: Season Two" is a bit more rambling, though.

"There's nothing good to be said about wicked men; but finding a worthy man is quite an event, for they are few & far between! And when one really comes to know some of those thought to be worthy men, one often finds, to put it plainly, nothing in them but a bag of wind. The wicked often deceive people & turn their heads by appearances: there are some very stupid folk who praise a man for his apparent worth, not according to his deeds or wisdom."

"A man does ill to forget a shame or injury done to him - the pain passes but the shame remains in a staunch and vigorous man, but in a man of little worth it dies away and cools."

Mediaeval toxic masculinity, resulting in "honour" killings, revenge plots and generational vendetta. The basis of later European aristocratic culture?

"She clad and dressed him in the Welsh fashion, where shoes and leggings, I believe, are in one piece; and he had a hooded tunic of deer-hide, stitched tight all around...He was dressed in the style and manner of the Welsh, with shoes of coarse hide on his feet, and wherever he went he always bore three javelins: he wanted to take them with him now, but his mother took two of them because he would have looked too Welsh." ??????? ??

I'm not 100% sure I'm in the right frame of mind to read this, but it's been on my shelf since 1986, so perhaps its time has come!

The last of Chrétien de Troyes' Arthurian romances, unfinished at the time of his death in 1185, left the mystery of the Grail unanswered. This edition also contains the four Continuations made by different authors in the few decades after Chrétien's death, for a chivalric audience evidently avid to know the ending.

This time in #Medievalbooks one for everyone: Perceval. If you like stories about The Knights of the Round Table, Chrétien de Troyes is your guy. He pretty much invented all the things we now know (including the famous Lancelot and his affair with Guinevere). Perceval is his last book and he kind of died before finishing it and explaining what the Grail is. That gave way to the many stories and Christian speculations!
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