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reveals to him the dangers of remaining in Constantinople. After defeating the Saracens, Guy goes out to explore the country, only to discover a dragon attacking a lion in the woods. In a scene that parallels Guy’s victory over the Saracens, the hero saves the lion by stabbing the dragon through the throat and beheading it, much as he killed the Sultan besieging Constantinople. The lion, grateful for Guy’s service, becomes the hero’s faithful companion in a re-enactment of Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain, or Le Chevalier au Lion. In medieval European literature, lions
noble household in fifteenth-century England [Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998], 45) or the merely ‘topical expression of (usually false) modesty’ (John Dagenais, The ethics of reading in manuscript culture: glossing the Libro de Buen Amor [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994], 24). 2 For examinations of the humility topos and its classical tradition, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European literature and the Latin Middle Ages, transl. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 407–13; see also Barbara Newman, who examines its