Agency in the Representations of Medieval Aristocratic Women in the Illuminated Manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes

Abstract

This project extended the scope of my English Honors thesis, analyzing two poems by the twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes. I initially analyzed how The Knight with the Lion (Yvain) depicted female agency in the twelfth-century courts with the potential for a contemporary reality to appear. This project asks whether my literary thesis could find validity in the illustrations within the Yvain manuscripts. That is: What do manuscript illustrations tell us about how the artists of two Yvain manuscripts interpreted Chrétien’s portrayal of women exerting their agency? Several scholars interested in the topic, specifically Nancy B. Black, James A. Rushing Jr., and Sandra Hindman, looked at the manuscripts for how they inform the text Chrétien wrote. I would like to compare these interpretations with my analysis of the literary narrative and my own interpretation of the pictorial narrative found within the manuscripts. My research on these two manuscripts looks toward how these artists interpreted Chrétien’s text and shows how one manuscript regards Yvain as a knightly exemplum and the other addresses the importance of women to Yvain’s journey.