San Antonio College Library

French literature, it has been said, began with "The Song of Roland". This great narrative poem of the late eleventh century share with its epic predecessors by Homer and Vergil a heroic vision of war and warriors. The historical battle of Rencesvals in A.D. 778 was a thwarted enterprise ending in a painful loss, the death of Charlemagne's greatest knight, Roland. In the poem, however, this story of betrayal, defeat and futile death is transfigured...

"Reading the Song of Roland" was written to encourage readers to recognize among the obscurities, the contradictions, and the improbable hyperboles of the "Song of Roland", a number of unmistakable triumphs which will make them eager ot come to grips with the poem and its feudal world. Aside from its capacity to entertain us or to serve as an ethnological prism, the "Song of Roland" raises fascinating critical and interpretive problems that are relevant...

"The story of the Grail, usually identified as some kind of mystical vessel, has gripped the imaginations of millions since it first appeared in several medieval romances. Of these, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Middle High German Parzival (c. 1210) is generally recognized as the most complex and beautiful. Strangely, in Parzival, the Grail is identified as a stone rather than a cup or dish. This oddity is usually seen as just another mystery, further...

Chronicle of events of the Trojan War from the death of Hector to the departure of the Greeks from Troy. Written about 360 A.D.

"Reynard the Fox employs a dark and outrageous sense of humor to puncture the hypocritical authority figures of the 'civilized' order, as the rhetorically brilliant fox outwits all comers by manipulating their bottomless greed. As James Simpson, one of the world's leading scholars of medieval literature, notes in his introduction, with translations in every major European language and twenty-three separate editions between 1481 and 1700 in England...