I'll take the occasion of Dennis Miller's mea culpa to reiterate and
clarify the point of my original inquiry:
The blessing and the curse is that the continuations and later redactions
of Chretien's grail story (such as the Quest of the Grail) place explicit
religious interpretations on things that Chretien himself left ambiguous
(or perhaps, rather, things which the unfinished tale leaves unexplained);
therefore rather specific influences can be detected in these later works.
It is not my intention to identify, necessarily, a particular kind of
religious bias or influence in Chretien; rather, I hope to show how what
Mary Carruthers calls the "memorial culture" of the middle ages is
reflected in the story of Perceval (and, to a lesser extent, in Chretien's
other romances). For this reason, I'm looking for sources that might have
been au courant in Chretien's day which touch on the role memory properly
plays in spiritual development.
At 12:27 PM 1/10/2001 -0600, Dennis Martin wrote:
>Picking up a thread from last week in response to a post originally coming
>from Lisa Nicholas:
>
>Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. The well-known connection is between
>Cistercians and the Quest of the Grail, not Chretien. No wonder no one
>had anything much to contribute on this. Leopold Grill has made a case
>for linkage between Chretien, the court of the counts of Champagne, and
>the Cistercians, including Otto of Freising, but he is apparently the only
>one to do so.
>
>Dennis Martin
Lisa Nicholas, Ph.D. candidate
Institute of Philosophic Studies
University of Dallas
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