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I focus on him here is his reputation as an influential advocate of medieval popular romance; what I want to demonstrate is the extent to which such advocacy is, in the history of romance scholarship, invariably compromised. 10 Percy’s inscription is printed in Hales and Furnivall, Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript, vol. 1, p. lxxiv. 11 Chaplain to the Northumberlands and author of their family history (a position he secured on the back of the Reliques’ popular success), Percy was appointed in 1769 one of the King’s Chaplains en route, via a deanship, to the
was fuelled by my own identity and ancestry, by traces of names and occupations almost forgotten by the passage of time, by a family history of blacksmiths and other workers, at once too late and too soon for the ideals of the craft movement to be fulfilled. Academia has offered me a way up the social ladder, but not without an attendant anxiety about what is left behind, what is lost or abandoned, in the pursuit of an intellectual career, the life of the mind at the expense of the craft of the hands. I have tried to counter this sense of loss with scholarship that
to emphasise the continuity of the story line. While it would obviously be misleading to say that such continuity is wholly absent from the Conte du Graal, Chrétien’s fabula plainly does not unravel as perspicuously as Percyvell’s, either in terms of presentation (witness the temporal distortions) or content. Specifically, compared with Percyvell’s mother, Perceval’s has been strikingly more successful in erasing the boy’s family history. The hero has no name apart from her appellation ‘fair son’, and no heirloom materialises the affinity between father and son