« Vieux romans » et « Grand Siècle » : éditions et réceptions de la littérature chevaleresque médiévale dans la France du XVIIe siècle

“Vieux romans” et “Grand Siècle” addresses the fortune of medieval romances of chivalry in seventeenth-century France. The expression ‘roman de chevalerie’ (chivalric romance) was first used in 1627. It referred to fictional texts recounting the fantastic exploits of heroic knights in a medieval setting. This means that the literary genre of the ‘roman de chevalerie’ consisted of texts which modern literary historians rarely place under the same umbrella: (prose adaptations of) Arthurian romances, epic Charlemagne romances, adventure romances and (translations and imitations of) Spanish and Italian chivalric stories from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Some of these texts can hardly be considered as medieval romances, but to do justice to the point of view of seventeenth-century France we have included them in our studies. Contrary to what many handbooks of literary history claim, the publication of Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605-1615), translated in French between 1614 and 1618, has by no means put an end to the popularity of the chivalric romance. Research in catalogues of public libraries, auction catalogues and archives has revealed that between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century French printers and booksellers published more than 300 editions of 37 different medieval romances of chivalry. A succinct bibliographical description of the editions and a list of the copies that we have been able to locate can be found in one of the appendixes to our dissertation. The first part of the book concentrates on the production of editions of chivalric romances in the seventeenth century and on the booksellers and the printers that were involved in their publication and distribution. We have examined the development of the production, the sources of the seventeenth-century editions, as well as the modifications that were made to the source texts. An important part of these seventeenth-century editions belonged to the so-called “Bibliothèque bleue” (“blue library”): inexpensive and low-quality reprints of popular books intended for a large public. Historians tend to reserve this term for books and pamphlets printed in Troyes, but we argue that it also applies to some of the romances of chivalry published in other seventeenth-century French printing centres. Besides these cheap publications, relatively expensive editions were issued as well. These were meant for a more sophisticated clientele. The reading public and the reception of medieval chivalric literature constitute the subject of the second part of our thesis. During the seventeenth century, there were several shifts in the composition of the reading public. From 1630-1640 onwards a dichotomy is visible between the traditional readers and new groups of less cultivated readers. The French public of the “Grand Siècle” used and valued the medieval chivalric romances in many different ways, but it has become clear that the three main ingredients of the old romances, heroic actions, love stories and fantastic adventures, have for various reasons appealed to the imagination of a large number of these “modern” readers