| Summary: | The Middle English verse romance Sir Percyvell of Gales was preserved in a unique copy in the Thornton manuscript held by the Lincoln Cathedral Library as MS 91. Altogether the manuscript contains sixty-four texts of various genres ranging from saints' lives to medical treatises as well as eight romances, including Sir Percyvell. Although the manuscript was written around the half of the 15th century, the date of composition of the poem was set early in the 14th century.1 The foolish, blundering, and unmannerly knight Perceval made his first appearance on the stage of medieval European literature in Chrétien de Troyes's twelfth-century Le Conte du Graal, or Le Roman de Perceval, an unfinished masterpiece of 9234 lines, which turned out to be one of the founding texts of the genre of Arthurian verse romance2 not only in French, but also in all the other vigorously developing national literary languages of Western Europe of that time. Chrétien's Perceval is a prime example of the refined courtly mode of chivalric romance. It is embroidered with subtle love-talk and ritualized courtly manners. It features long psychologizing sketches of the heroes, a composition which is far from linear and in which events are often presented not in chronological order, but rather in a changed succession subjected to the...
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