The Poetics of Sacrifice: Allegory and Myth in the Grail Quest

Author(s): Peggy McCracken

Source: Yale French Studies , 1999, No. 95, Rereading Allegory: Essays in Memory of
Daniel Poirion (1999), pp. 152-168
Published by: Yale University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3040750

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 PEGGY MCCRACKEN

The Poetics of Sacrifice: Allegory and

Myth in the Grail Quest

Ce champ si glorieux oi vous aspirez tous

Si mon sang ne 1'arrose, est sterile pour tous.
-Racine, Iphigenie, II. 1543-44

Perceval's contemplation of three drops of blood on the snow in Chre-

tien de Troyes's Conte du graal is surely one of the most intriguing
scenes in all of medieval romance. As a figural representation, the red
blood on the white snow reminds Perceval of his beloved Blanchefleur's
face; but as many critics have suggested, within the context of Le conte
du graal the image has meanings that extend beyond the simple re-
semblance recognized by Perceval. What is figured by the red blood on
the white snow and what effect the interpretation has on Perceval are
central questions in the episode.1
Daniel Poirion has emphasized that the three drops of blood on
the snow may function as a gloss, in Marie de France's definition of a
gloss as an elucidation of textual obscurities.2 He suggests that the
three drops of blood may evoke meaning in the process analogous to
1. On the use of this motif in Celtic texts, see Martin de Riquer, "Perceval y las go-
tas de sangre en la nieve," Revista de filologia espafiola 39 (1955): 186-219; and Grace
Armstrong, "The Scene of the Blood Drops on the Snow: A Crucial Narrative Moment
in the Conte du graal," Kentucky Romance Quarterly 19 (1972): 127-47.
2. Daniel Poirion, "Du sang sur la neige. Nature et fonction de l'image dans le Conte
du graal, " in Voices of Conscience: Essays on Medieval and Modern French Literature
in Memory of J. D. Powell and Rosemary Hodgins, ed. Raymond J. Cormier (Philadel-
phia: Temple University Press, 1977), 158. Armstrong notes a similar function for the
episode: "The bloodshed is hardly the object of Chr6tien's interest. It functions rather as
the means which brings into focus previously introduced narrative motifs" (132).

YFS 95, Rereading Allegory, ed. Sahar Amer and Noah D. Guynn, copyright C 1999 by
Yale University.

152

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 PEGGY McCRACKEN 153

that explicated by dream psychology, that they may explain something

about the grail procession-a scene strongly marked by its dreamlike
quality-through reference to other episodes in the romance. In
Poirion's reading, the blood drops that provoke Perceval's memory of
Blanchefleur also recall his earlier encounter with the lady in the tent,
as well as the knight's visit to the grail castle.3
The link between the grail procession and the two encounters with
ladies provided by Poirion's interpretation of the dreamwork of the
blood drops is a suggestive one, and a thirteenth-century retelling of
Chretien's grail story may provide a lens through which to read its
significance. The thirteenth-century Perlesvaus rewrites Perceval's
reverie over the three drops of blood on the snow as a trance-like med-
itation by Gauvain over three blood drops that fall from the bleeding
lance onto a white cloth during the ritual procession at the grail castle.
Whereas Perceval was lost in the memory of his beloved, Gauvain is
rendered speechless by the sight of the grail and the explicitly sacrifi-
cial Eucharistic images that accompany it. A second episode from the
Perlesvaus follows the structure of Perceval's encounter with the Tent
Maiden in Le conte du graal, but ends with the violent murder of a
woman that is later explained as a sacrifice.
The Perlesvaus represents social order in terms of a religious order
symbolically enacted through sacrifice. I will argue that Chretien's ro-
mance gives sacrifice a similar function. Although sacrifice is figural
and secular in Le conte du graal, when the romance is read through the
gloss offered by representations of sacred sacrifice in the Perlesvaus,
Chretien's blood drops episode points to the importance of sacrifice in
the construction of chivalric identity in medieval romance. The blood
drops scene in Le conte du graal suggests that the romance myth of so-
cial order is grounded on the sacrifice of women.4

VIOLENCE, INITIATION, AND SACRIFICE

Poirion is one of the few critics to emphasize the violence that intro-
duces the scene of Perceval's amorous reverie over the three drops of

3. Poirion, "Du sang sur la neige," 158-60.

4. For a different analysis of the paradigms of sacrifice and rescue, see Louise 0.
Fradenburg, "Sacrificial Desire in Chaucer's Knight's Tale," Journal of Medieval and
Early Modern Studies 27/1 (1997): 47-75, and "The Love of Thy Neighbor," in Con-
structing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A.
Schultz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 135-57.

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154 Yale French Studies

blood in the snow.5 As the knight sets out to seek adventure, he sees a
flock of geese flying past, pursued by a falcon. When one of the geese
becomes separated from the others, the falcon attacks it:

Si l'a ferue et si hurtee

Qu'ancontre terre l'abati.

La gente fu ferue el col,

Si seinna trois gotes de sanc
Qui espandirent sor le blanc,
Si sanbla natural color.

Et Percevax vit defolee

La noif qui soz la gente jut,
Et le sanc qui ancor parut.
Si s'apoia desor sa lance
Por esgarder cele sanblance;
Que li sans et la nois ansanble
La fresche color li resanble
qui est an la face s'amie,
Et panse tant qu'il s'oblie,
Que ausi aloit an son vis
Li vermauz sor le blanc asis
Come les gotes de sanc furent
Qui desor le blanc aparurent.
An l'esgarder que il feisoit
Li ert avis, tant li pleisoit,
Qu'il veist la color novele
De la face s'amie bele.
Percevax sor les gotes muse
Tote la matinee et use.

[The falcon] attacked it, throwing it to the ground.... The goose was
wounded in the neck and had shed three drops of blood, which spread
on the white snow like a natural color.... When Perceval saw the tram-
pled snow where the goose had lain and the still visible blood, he leaned
on his lance to gaze at the image. The blood and the snow together re-
minded him of the fresh color of his beloved's face, and he mused until
he forgot himself. The red stood out against the white of her face like
the drops of blood on the white snow. The sight gave him such pleasure

5. Poirion, Resurgences. Mythe et litterature a 1'ge du symbole (XIIe siecle) (Paris:

Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), 202-3; see also "Du sang sur la neige," 160-61.

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 PEGGY McCRACKEN 155

that he believed he was beholding the fresh color of his beloved's face.
Perceval spent the entire morning lost in his contemplation.6

The violence of the attack that produces the image contemplated

by Perceval is not emphasized in the text, and Perceval's amorous
reverie over the blood drops is usually read as a sign of the new knight's
initiation into an awareness of love and of himself as a desiring subject,
to the world of chivalric prowess motivated by love, or to subjectivity
itself.7 The knight's contemplative musing is interrupted by Sagremors
and Keu with their challenges to battle, and then by Gauvain, who rec-
ognizes and values Perceval's amorous reverie as a sign of his courtli-
ness, and invites him to join Arthur's court. The contemplation of the
blood drops on the snow thus initiates Perceval's integration into the
courtly and chivalric brotherhood of Arthur's court.
Many critics have suggested that the blood drops on the snow in Le
conte du graal also refer to blood from the lance that Perceval saw in
the grail procession.8 In Chretien's romance the lance is not part of a
Christian myth; it is only in later grail stories like the Perlesvaus that
the lance is explicitly associated with the violence of the crucifixion.
While retellings of the grail story following Le conte du graal explain
the mythic content of the romance through Christian exegesis, the
later texts may also expose the structures inherent in Chretien's ro-
mance that invited such elaborations. That is, the later texts may sug-
gest the potential symbolic functions of the mythic content of Le conte
du graal, even as those rewritings interpret the story of the grail as a
Christian allegory. In particular, two rewritings of episodes from Chre-
tien's romance as scenes of sacred sacrifice in the Perlesvaus suggest
that the story of Perceval's initiation into chivalry may be read as a
story of sacrificial violence.
The violence figured in Chretien's blood drops scene takes on reli-

6. Chr6tien de Troyes, Perceval, ou le conte du graal, in Oeuvres completes, ed.

Poirion (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliotheque de la P1kiade, 1997), 11. 4186-4212. Translations
are mine, here and throughout, unless specified otherwise.
7. Poirion, "Du sang sur la neige, " 155; Pierre Gallais, Perceval et linitiation (Paris:
Sirac, 1972), esp. 26-34; Paule Le Rider, Le chevalier dans le Conte du graal de Chretien
de Troyes (Paris: CDU and SEDES, 1978), 185-92; Henri Rey-Flaud, "Le sang sur la neige.
Analyse d'une image-ecran de Chrdtien de Troyes," Litterature 37 (1980): 23; Karl D.
Uitti, Story, Myth, and Celebration in Old French Narrative Poetry, 1050-1200 (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 205-13.
8. See, among others, Poirion, "Du sang sur la neige," 156; Le Rider, Le chevalier,
188 -89; and David C. Fowler, Prowess and Charityin the Perceval of Chretien de Troyes
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1959), 44.

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156 Yale French Studies

gious significance in the Perlesvaus, where the blood drops are situated
within a Christian symbolic space: Gauvain contemplates three drops
of blood that fall from the bleeding lance onto a white tablecloth dur-
ing the explicitly Eucharistic grail procession.9 The Eucharistic ritual
is insistently represented as a ritual of sacrifice in Gauvain's visit to the
grail castle in the Perlesvaus. He sees not only the grail, but "the form
of a child" inside the grail as well, and, later, the crucified Christ.

Missire Gavains esgarda le Graal, et li senble q'il voie une chandoile de-
denz, donc il n'ert gaires a icel tens, et voit la pointe de la lance donc li
sans vermauz chiet, et li senble qu'il voit .ii. angres qui portent .ii. chan-
delabres d'or espris de chandoiles. Les damoiseles passent par devant
Monsaignor Gavain et vont en une autre chapele, et Missire Gavains est
pensis, et li vient si grant joie en sa pensee q'il ne li menbre de rien se
de Dieu non.... Atant es vos les .ii. damoiseles ou il issent de la chapele
et revienent par devant Monsaignor Gavain [ ...] et li senble q'il voit enmi
le Graal la forme d'un enfant.... [I]l esgarde devant lui et voit chaoir
iii. gotes del sanc desus la table, si fu toz esbahiz de l'esgarder, si ne dist
mot.... Missire Gavains ne pot oster ses ieuz des iii. gotes de sanc, et
qant il les volt baillier, si li eschiuent, dont il est molt dolenz, car il n'i
peut metre sa main ne chose qui de lui soit a tochier. Atant es vos les
ii. damoiselles qui revienent par devant la table, et senble a Monsaignor
Gavain q'il en i ait trois; et esgarde contremont et li senble que li Graax
soit tot en l'air. Et voit, ce li est avis, par deseure un home cloufichie en
une croiz, et li estoit le glaive fichie eu coste.

Messire Gauvain looks at the Grail, and he thinks he sees a candle in-
side it, although there wasn't one at that time; he sees the point of the
lance from which the red blood falls, and he thinks he sees two angels
carrying two golden candelabras filled with candles. The maidens pass
in front of Monseigneur Gauvain and go into another chapel. Messire
Gauvain is deep in thought, and his thoughts bring him such great joy
that he does not remember anything but God.... Then the two maid-
ens come back out of the chapel and pass again in front of Monseigneur
Gauvain.... He thinks he sees the form of a child inside the Grail....
[Gauvain] looks back and sees three drops of blood fall on the table, and
he is astonished to see it, and does not say a word.... Messire Gauvain
cannot take his eyes off the three drops of blood, and when he wants to
touch them, they disappear, and he is very sad because he cannot put
his hand on what he is not meant to touch. Then the two maidens come

9. Others have noted the repetition: Antoinette Saly, Image, structure et sens.
Etudes arthuriennes, Senefiance 34 (Aix-en-Provence: CUERMA, 1995): 168n4; Gallais,
Perceval et 1'initiation, 60.

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 PEGGY McCRACKEN 157

back and pass in front of the table, and it seems to Monseigneur Gau-
vain that there are three of them, and he looks up and it seems to him
that the Grail is raised in the air. And he thinks he sees above it a man
crucified on a cross, with a lance thrust in his side.10

The myth of the grail introduced in Chretien's romance has here been
thoroughly assimilated into Christian ritual and symbolism. The mys-
tery of the grail has become the mystery of transubstantiation, and
Gauvain participates in the ritual meal of the Eucharist as a spectator:
he views but does not taste the transformation of the sacrificed body.
Sacrificial imagery characterizes the Eucharist throughout the Per-
lesvaus. In an early episode in the romance, King Arthur sees a woman
kiss her baby and address him as her son, her father, and her lord. She
hands the baby to a hermit, who places him on an altar and begins the
mass. Arthur then sees the priest holding in his hands the bleeding
body of the crucified Christ, which changes into the shape of the in-
fant, who is called an "offering" (35-37). Miri Rubin has described this
kind of imagery as bringing together "two strains in eucharistic sym-
bolism, one which stresses the presence of a real human, suffering
body, a historic Christ born to a Virgin, and the other [which] stresses
redemption through sacrifice."1 1 Indeed, the Perlesvaus is full of sac-
rificial imagery of all kinds, including blood vengeance and cannibal-
ism: Arthur is cured of a wound with the blood of the knight who
wounded him (38-9); King Gurguran has his dead son's body boiled,
cut into small pieces, and sent as a ritual meal to all the men of his land
(105); and Perceval punishes his defeated enemy, the Sire des Mores, by
decapitating his knights and collecting their blood in a barrel, then
hanging the Sire des Mores by the feet with his head in the blood until
he drowns (234).
While the prominent sacrificial symbolism in the grail procession
witnessed by Gauvain fits into the overall emphasis on blood and blood
sacrifice in the Perlesvaus, the precise repetition of Chretien's blood
drops scene in the later romance-the three drops of blood, Gauvain's
trance-like contemplation of the red blood on the white background-
offers both a rewriting and an interpretation of the blood drops episode

10. Le haut livre du Graal, Perlesvaus, ed. William A. Nitze and T. Atkinson Jen-
kins, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), 119, translation mine.
11. Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 136. William Roach traces the development
of this representation in "Eucharistic Tradition in the Perlesvaus," Zeitschrift fir Ro-
manische Philologie 59 (1939): 10-56.

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158 Yale French Studies

in Le conte du graal. It suggests that, although Chretien's roma

not explicitly use sacrificial imagery, sacrifice may implicitly structure
the knight's initiation into chivalry. In what may be a rewriting of
Perceval's two encounters with the Tent Maiden (whom he abuses, and
then rescues), as the story of Gauvain's failure to save a falsely accused
lady (who is murdered by her jealous husband), the Perlesvaus points
to the way violence against women functions as an initiatory sacrifice
that symbolically confers chivalric identity and maintains the social
order created and guaranteed by knights in battles.12

RITUAL, MYTH, AND ALLEGORY

If, as Poirion has suggested, in Chretien's romance the blood drops re-
call the violence of the falcon's hunt and point to Perceval's checked
assault on the Tent Maiden earlier in the narrative, and if "the young
man's attack [on the woman] is as brutal as the falcon's attack, " 13 this
episode of violence against a woman is an integral part of the represen-
tation of Perceval's integration into Arthur's court. And if the en-
counter with the Tent Maiden somehow prepares the knight's initia-
tion into the chivalric brotherhood, it might also offer a point of
departure for the interrogation of the place of violence in the social
practice of chivalry and love, and its function in the political, familial,
and amorous structures of medieval romance. The sequence of adven-
tures resumed in the blood drops scene-Perceval's attack on the Tent
Maiden, his encounter with Blanchefleur, his subsequent rescue of the
abused Tent Maiden, and the new knight's integration into the court-
suggests that the violence that begins the young man's trajectory to-
ward chivalric identity may be seen as a part of a ritualized cycle of ini-
tiation: the assault of the woman is followed by heroic rescue, and then
by a recognition of the knight's qualities and by his integration into the
court.
Gauvain's encounter with the wife of Marin le Jaloux in the Per-
lesvaus follows a similar structure, at least in the beginning. When
Gauvain arrives at Marin's castle, the knight himself is absent, and his

12. Charles M6la notes the resemblance between the Tent Maiden episode in Le
conte du graal and the Marin le Jaloux episode in the Perlesvaus, though he does not an-
alyze the similarity in detail. See La reine et le graal. La con jointure dans les romans du
graal, de Chretien de Troyes au Livre de Lancelot (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 187-88. Perceval
also encounters a "Reine des Tentes" in the Perlesvaus (151-53), but the episode in which
she appears is unrelated to the encounter with the Tent Lady in-Le conte du graal.
13. Poirion, "Du sang sur la neige," 160, translation mine.

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 PEGGY McCRACKEN 159

wife greets Gauvain reluctantly. She is happy to welcome such a great

knight, but is apprehensive about receiving him in her husband's ab-
sence because Marin sees Gauvain as a threat to his wife's chastity,
claiming that "Messire Gavains ne porta foi a dame ne a demoisele qu'il
n'en feist sa volente" (Messire Gauvain never declared his love to a lady
or to a maiden without having his way with her) (Perlesvaus, 74). The
lady receives Gauvain with courtesy, and the knight responds with re-
straint. An evil dwarf, however, goes to Marin le Jaloux and falsely re-
ports that his wife has slept with Gauvain. Marin returns to his castle
and accuses his wife of infidelity. She denies that she has betrayed him,
but her husband does not believe her. He has her stripped to her chemise
and pulled by the hair into the forest. He forces her to stand in a cold
lake beside a spring and begins to beat her. He strikes her on the back
and on the breasts until the water of the spring is red with blood. Then
Messire Gauvain arrives.
Up to this point the narrative offers a condensed and violent version
of Perceval's two encounters with the lady in the tent: the knight vis-
its a lady in the absence of her husband/lover; the lady is then unjustly
accused of sexual infidelity and is mistreated by her lover; and, finally,
the knight accused of seducing her arrives to prove her innocence and
rescue her from unmerited humiliation and pain. In this episode of the
Perlesvaus, however, the rescue does not happen. Gauvain offers to de-
fend the lady in battle with Marin, and the two knights draw back for
the charge.

Li chevaliers se tret arriere por prendre son esles, e Messire Gavains

vient vers lui qanque chevaus Ii pot rendre. Marins le Jalox fuit Mon-
seigneur Gavain qant il le voit venir e eschiue son cop. Il besse son glaive
e va vers sa fame, qi se dementoit en plorant comme cele qui cope n'i
avoit. II la fiert parmi le cors e ocit. [Perlesvaus, 77]

The knight draws back for the charge, as Messire Gauvain goes toward
him as fast as his horse can go. Marin le Jaloux flees Monseigneur Gau-
vain when he sees him coming, and avoids his blow. He lowers his lance
and goes toward his wife, who sat crying like one who was innocent. He
strikes her in the middle of her body and kills her.

Gauvain's failure to save the lady remains unexplained in this scene. 14

Gauvain himself does not understand the knight's violent conduct and

14. Nitze notes that while the narrative motif may have its source in earlier ana-
logues, the killing of the wife and the escape of her murderer are original in the Per-
lesvaus. See Perlesvaus, vol. 2, 239.

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160 Yale French Studies

his refusal of the chivalric code; unable to bury the dead lady, Gauvain
leaves her body in a chapel and continues on his way.
As in the episode that recounts Gauvain's visit to the grail castle,
the Perlesvaus repeatedly represents social order as dependent on sac-
rifice, and in particular on religious sacrifice: the romance begins by re-
counting how King Arthur's loss of the desire to exercise largesse and
win honor is cured during a Eucharistic vision that features sacrifice.
After a perilous journey to a chapel in Wales, Arthur sees a baby trans-
formed into the host. The religious economy of sacrifice also explains
the murder of the wrongly accused woman, as a priest explains to Gau-
vain later in the story:

Sire, fait soi li prestres, ce fu molt grant joie de la senefiance de sa mort,

car Josephes nos tesmoige que la Viez Loi fu abatue par un coup de glaive
sanz resociter, et por la Viez Loi abatre se sofri Diex a ferir en coste du
glaive, et par ce coup fu la [Viez] Loi abatue et par son crucefiement. La
dame senefie la Viez Loi. [Perlesvaus, 110-11]

"Sire," said the priest, "there was great joy in the significance of her
death, for Joseph tells us that the Old Law was destroyed by the blow
of a lance without resuscitation, and in order to destroy the Old Law,
God suffered the blow of a lance in his side, and with this blow and with
his crucifixion the Old Law was destroyed. The lady signifies the Old
Law. "

The priest goes on to explain that the murdered woman's son, whom
Gauvain met later in the forest, represents the Savior, who was born in
the Old Law.15
In the Perlesvaus, the lady and her jealous husband become alle-
gorical figures in a drama of sacrifice and redemption. Like the scene in
which Gauvain contemplates the blood drops from the lance, this
episode rewrites an episode from Le conte du graal and situates it
within a Christian symbolic economy. Yet here the rewriting appro-
priates the narrative motif of the chivalric rescue of women and ex-
tends its meaning through an explicitly allegorical explanation. This
appropriation of narrative motifs, and their transformation for the pro-

15. Margaret Schlauch relates representations of the Old Law and the New in the
Perlesvaus to contemporary church literature on the Synagogue and the Church. How-
ever, she does not treat this episode in the romance. See "The Allegory of Church and
Synagogue," Speculum 14 (1939): 448-64. Rosemund Tuve discusses the ways in which
the Perlesvaus resists a sustained allegorical reading. This resistance renders both the
event and its explanation all the more surprising. Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval
Books and Their Posterity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 402-10.

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 PEGGY McCRACKEN 161

duction of new meanings, is the fundamental work of allegory, accord-

ing to Poirion:

The allegorical work effects a sort of transmutation of the literary

givens it inherits, reducing romances, poems, and didactic treatises to
their basic outlines and to their foundational notions, and recomposing
from these elements a literary substance.... Allegorical composition
uses previous writing in a particular way: it neglects the "primary mat-
ter" of Arthurian romances, but appropriates its moral signification ul-
timately to designate something else.16

Poirion's explanation of the literary work of allegory provides a struc-

ture through which to identify the "foundational notions" that the al-
legory appropriates in order to build new meanings. If allegory exposes
that which is hidden in the symbolic representations of the literary
structures it inherits, the allegory of the destruction of the Old Law sug-
gests that the "foundational notion" the allegory adopts from the Tent
Maiden episode is the importance of the sacrifice of women in the con-
struction of social order. The Perlesvaus appropriates the sacrifice to
ground an allegory of religious order.
In Le conte du graal the lady in the tent is not killed after Perceval
leaves her to her lover's vengeance. She does not even bleed, though her
ordeal is clearly a physical one. Indeed, the lady describes her life as
worse than the death for which she longs (11. 3752-62). The Tent
Maiden suffers her undeserved fate because of Perceval's rash attack,
an act that may be seen as a figural sacrifice. While the allegory of sac-
rifice in the Perlesvaus has a religious significance-it represents the
destruction of the Old Law-the function of the figural sacrifice in Le
conte du graal remains to be discovered.
In the Perlesvaus, the priest's explanation of the murder of Marin's
wife valorizes maternal descent at the same time that the mother is
eliminated: the Old Law, mother of the New Law, is destroyed so that
her son may thrive. This structure is a familiar one to readers of Chre-
tien's Conte du graal, in which Perceval's mother dies, but in which en-
counters with her family later orient the knight's grail quest and ulti-
mately lead him to knowledge of the grail secrets. Mothers are
generally marginalized characters in medieval romances, and the un-
usually prominent role played by Perceval's mother in Le conte du
graal seems to point to a new function for maternal figures in chivalric

16. Daniel Poirion, "L'all6gorie dans le Livre du cuer d'amours espris, de Ren6 d'An-
jou, " Travaux de linguistique et de litterature 9/2 (1971): 57.

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162 Yale French Studies

romance. Poirion has suggested that the grail myth founds a new social
organization in which mothers play an important role, 17 while Matilda
Bruckner has noted the ambivalence about mothers that characterizes
Le conte du graal. 18 I want to stress the anxious negotiation of the im-
portance accorded to mothers within the construction of chivalric
identity, and to suggest that in Le conte du graal ambivalence about
mothers is resolved through rituals of sacrifice.

BLOODRIGHT AND BLOODRITES

Knights are generally represented as a descent group in medieval ro-

mances: great knights produce sons who are destined to be great knights.
Chivalric prowess is represented as something like a bloodright, and the
importance of lineage is particularly evident in romances about un-
known knights who reveal their noble identity through their extraordi-
nary prowess. For example, in romances that recount the adventures of
Gauvain's unnamed son, the knight's noble bloodlines are evident to ob-
servers even before they know to whose lineage he belongs. In the Prose
Lancelot, King Pelles's daughter pursues sexual intercourse with
Lancelot, not out of passion or "excitement of the flesh," but because
she wishes to conceive his son.19 Chivalric descent is not exclusively
patrilineal in medieval romance, however. A knight's relationship to a
chivalric heritage may come from his mother's family: Gauvain is usu-
ally identified as the nephew of King Arthur, the son of the king's sister.
In both models, chivalric identity is a family matter, as Perceval's
mother's reluctant revelation of her son's heritage emphasizes:

Chevaliers estre detissiez,

Biax filz, se Damedeu pletist
Que votre pere vos eiist
Garde, et voz autres amis.
N'ot chevalier de si haut pris,
Tant redote ne tant cremu,
Biax filz, com vostre peres fu,

17. See Poirion, "L'ombre mythique de Perceval dans le Conte du graal," Cahiers de
civilisation med~ivale 16 (1973): 197-98.
18. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, "Rewriting Chr6tien's Conte du graal-Mothers
and Sons: Questions, Contradictions, and Connections, " The Medieval Opus: Imitation,
Rewriting, and Transmission in the French Tradition, ed. Douglas Kelly (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 1996), 213-44.
19. Lancelot. Roman en prose du XIIIe sikle, ed. Alexardre Micha (Geneva: Droz,
1978 -83), vol. 7, 209-1 1.

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 PEGGY McCRACKEN 163

An totes les Isles de mer.

De ce vos poez bien vanter
Que vos ne decheez de rien
De son linage ne del mien,
Que je fui de chevaliers nee,
Des mellors de ceste contree.
Es Isles de mer n'ot linage
Meillor del mien an mon aage. [Conte du graal, 11. 412-26]

You should have been a knight, fair son, if it had pleased God that your
father and your other friends had trained you. There was no knight more
worthy, more dreaded or more feared, fair son, than your father was in
all the Isles of the Sea. Fair son, you can boast of lacking nothing from
his lineage or from mine, for I am the daughter of one of the best knights
in this country. In all the Iles de Mer there was, in my lifetime, no lin-
eage better than mine.

The importance of Perceval's maternal lineage is readily apparent

in Chretien's Conte du graal. The new knight's promise to return to his
mother structures the first part of his quest, and encounters with his
maternal uncles mark the stages of his progress toward knowledge of
the grail secrets. However, if Perceval's quest is a story of initiation into
chivalry, it is also, at least in part, that of his escape from his mother-
to substitute chivalric custom for maternal instruction, and venture
forward rather than returning home.20 After he is knighted, Perceval's
tutor, Gornemant, explicitly advises the new knight not to explain or
justify his conduct by citing his mother; instead he should credit "the
vavassor who taught him to wear his armor" (11. 1675-88). The dis-
tancing of both the mother's influence and the mother herself contin-
ues in the rewriting of Perceval's story in the Perlesvaus. The impor-
tance of her family is diminished in the valorization of both maternal
and paternal lineages. While Perceval's mother's family is still impor-
tant (in the Perlesvaus she is identified as a descendent of Joseph of Ari-
mathea), his father's family is also traced back to Calvary and a new im-
portance is given to Perceval's paternal uncles.21 The prominence
accorded to Perceval's paternal lineage in the Perlesvaus continues the

20. R. Howard Bloch characterizes Perceval's mother as "an agent of interruption, "
in that she keeps the youth ignorant of knighthood. Etymologies and Genealogies: A Lit-
erary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983), 203.
21. Thomas E. Kelly, Le haut livre du graal, Perlesvaus: A Structural Study (Geneva:
Droz, 1974), 55-56.

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164 Yale French Studies

marginalization of the mother begun in Le conte de graal, the first in-

stance of which is located in the explicit modification of maternal in-
struction by the chivalric code after Perceval's encounter with the Tent
Maiden demonstrates the inadequacy of the mother's counsel.
In Perceval's attack of the Tent Maiden in Le conte du graal, vio-
lence is implicitly linked to the mother, since her advice is the inspi-
ration for the naive knight's conduct:

Einz vos beiserai ...

Fet li vaslez, cui qu'il soit grief,
Que ma mere le m'anseigna. [11. 693-95]

"I will kiss you" . . . says the boy, "whatever it costs me, for my mother
taught me to do so."

Perceval's assault on the Tent Maiden is a key episode in marking the

anxiety about matrilineage that structures his initiation into chivalry:
the absence of the father means that the son is unschooled in courtly
conduct and chivalric codes, and the mother's advice is inadequate to
instruct the knight. This anxiety may be seen to be resolved in the
knight's participation in the repeated episodes of sacrifice and rescue
that define chivalric conduct. That is, when chivalric exploits-par-
ticularly the rescue of ladies imperiled or wronged by other knights-
are seen as part of an economy of sacrifice, the repeated sacrifice and
rescue of women is revealed as a foundational attribute of chivalric
identity. A comparison of similar scenes in Le conte du graal and the
Perlesvaus suggests the importance of sacrifice in the definition of
chivalric identity; Nancy Jay's recent study of the gendered structure
of sacrificial rituals may point to how sacrifice serves to identify
knights in medieval romance.
Anthropologists generally identify sacrificial rituals as performing
two functions: expiation and communion. Expiation is defined as a
kind of differentiation, communion as a kind of integration; any sacri-
fice contains both elements, though one aspect is often emphasized
over the other. In her study of the symbolic, social function of sacrifice,
Nancy Jay has argued that most sacrificial rituals resemble one another
in that only men sacrifice: in virtually every culture that practices rit-
ual sacrifice, mothers, or women who could be mothers, do not perform
sacrifices.22 With reference to a wide range of anthropological studies,

22. Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Pa-
ternity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), xxiii.

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 PEGGY McCRACKEN 165

she claims that participation in sacrificial ritual symbolically expiates

femaleness, simultaneously enacting a transcendence of childbirth and
valorizing social structures the continuity of which flows through
men, not women (37).
Jay further claims that in societies where intergenerational rela-
tionships between men are crucial, rituals of sacrifice may be consid-
ered essential for the continuity of social order. She notes that it is
through sacrifice that patrilineal descent groups may be constituted by
familial relationships or by social organizations with no actual family
base, as is the case with a lineage of priests, or-to extend this model
to the social organization of medieval romance-a lineage of knights.
Jay writes:

When the crucial intergenerational link is between father and son, for
which birth itself cannot provide sure evidence, sacrificing may be con-
sidered essential for the continuity of the social order. What is needed
to provide clear evidence of social and religious paternity is an act as
definite and available to the senses as is birth. When membership in pa-
trilineal descent groups is identified by rights of participation in blood
sacrifice, evidence of "paternity" is created which is as certain as evi-
dence of maternity, but far more flexible. [36]

As I have noted above, chivalric descent is not figured only through fa-
thers; the mother's family may also be an important part of a knight's
chivalric heritage. Yet Jay sees the function of sacrifice at work even in
settings where descent through women is valued: "Sacrificing pro-
duces and reproduces forms of intergenerational continuity generated
by males, transmitted through males, and transcending continuity
through women" (32). The ultimate function of sacrifice, according to
Jay, is to resolve anxieties about matrilineage: "Sacrifice can expiate,
get rid of, the consequences of having been born of woman (along with
countless other dangers) and at the same time integrate the pure and
external patrilineage" (40).
In the world of chivalric romance, and particularly in grail romances
where knighthood becomes linked to priesthood, figures of sacrifice
may function to reaffirm the continuity of social structures based on
relationships between men. The sacrifice (and rescue) of women may
symbolically enact the initiation into a community of knights while
expiating the maternal presence that seems to trouble the constitution
of chivalric identity in Le conte du graal. What I am describing as the
sacrifice of women in medieval romances is not a literal blood sacrifice.
However, Perceval's attack of the Tent Maiden may be read as a figural

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166 Yale French Studies

sacrifice to the extent that it accomplishes the symbolic work of sacri-

ficial rituals as identified by Jay: it prepares the knight for initiation
into the masculine world of chivalry by creating the possibility of
rescue.
Perceval meets the Tent Maiden twice in Le conte du graal. Before
their first encounter, Perceval is drawn to the beauty of the maiden's
dwelling. Recalling his mother's advice, he is sure that an edifice of
such splendor must be a church, a place of sacrifice according to his
mother's definition:23

Et mostiers, qu'est? -Ice meisme:

Une meison bele et saintisme,
Ou il a cors sainz et tresors,
S'i sacrefie l'an le cors
Jesucrist, la prophete sainte. [11. 577-81]

"And what is a church? " "It is a beautiful and holy house where there
are holy relics and treasures. There the body of Jesus Christ, the holy
prophet, is sacrificed."

Perceval finds, not holy relics, but a maiden in a tent; and he attacks her
and abandons her to her lover's vengeance. In their second encounter he
undertakes a battle with her lover to prove the maiden's innocence and
restore her to her former status as trusted and beloved lady of a power-
ful knight. When the first encounter with the Tent Maiden is linked to
the blood drops scene in a poetics of sacrifice, its initiatory function is
revealed. The ignorant Welsh boy's improper adherence to his mother's
counsel in his violent assault on the lady in the tent, and his subsequent
renunciation of the mother and his rescue of the lady, permit his initi-
ation into a new, nonmaternal, spiritual lineage-the chivalric order.
And indeed, Perceval's contemplation of the three blood drops on the
snow is directly followed by his integration in Arthur's court-in the
words of Paule Le Rider, "Gauvain offers him the hand of virile friend-
ship" (Le chevalier, 92). While the blood drops left by the wounded
goose recall not only the face of Perceval's amie, Blanchefleur, but also
the violent encounter with the lady in the tent, the episode also sug-
gests that, within the chivalric brotherhood, the symbolic initiation
through sacrifice is a necessary complement to lineage.

23. Brigitte Cazelles has noted the mother's emphasis on sacrifice, though her view
of the relationship between sacrifice and social order is different from mine. See The Un-
holy Grail: A Social Reading of Chretien de Troyes's "Conte-du graal" (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1996), 206-7.

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 PEGGY McCRACKEN 167

As a chivalric ritual, sacrifice has a particular form in courtly ro-

mance: the sacrifice of women usually has a redemptive ending. A
knight's misdeeds or mistaken deeds cause an innocent woman to be
punished for having been the knight's victim, and this unjustly pun-
ished lady is later saved by the knight and reconciled with the lover,
husband, or relative who found her guilty. This double sacrifice of the
woman-by the knight who wrongs her and by the knight who pun-
ishes her-establishes a kinship between knights as adversaries (and
often as reconciled companions) that is based on the enforcement of
justice: the sacrifice of the lady makes possible her subsequent rescue,
whether by the knight who wronged her or by another knight who
remedies the wrong done by another.24 Medieval romances are, of
course, filled with examples of knights who save ladies-Perceval's res-
cue of Blanchefleur fits precisely into this paradigm. In Perceval's
mother's advice, as in Gornemant's instructions to the newly knighted
Perceval, that aid takes on the status of a chivalric duty (11. 533-40,
1657- 62). It is, in other words, an act that identifies a knight as a knight.
The rescue of ladies might thus be seen as part of a ritualized con-
struction of chivalric identity; and, like any ritual, it may be explained
not only by the intentions of the participants, but also by its effects.
A defining characteristic of chivalric identity, the rescue of ladies is
part of a social order established and maintained by Arthur's knights'
enforcement of justice. The function of rescue-and its corollary, sac-
rifice-in the chivalric code of conduct may be revealed in Perceval's
contemplation of the three drops of blood on the snow. The previous
episodes recalled by the blood image suggest the violence that struc-
tures the Arthurian world; the gloss provided by the blood drops scene
and by the revised repetition of the Tent Maiden episode in the Per-
lesvaus suggests the sacrificial nature of that violence.
The reading of Chretien's romance through the interpretive lens of
the Perlesvaus exposes the violence that subtends social order in Le
conte du graal; it also suggests the dependence of rescue on sacrifice,

24. On the figure of the rescued lady, see Marie-Luce Chenerie, Le chevalier errant
dans les romans arthuriens en vers des XIIe et XIIIe sikcles (Geneva: Droz, 1986), 446-
51. Chenerie focuses on the marriage that often ends these episodes. In Le conte du graal
and in the continuations of Chretien's romance, the rescue does not usually end in mar-
riage; rather, the knight continues his pursuit of adventure. See also Roberta L. Krueger's
discussion of the pucelle desconseillee figure and notions of honor in "Transforming
Maidens: Singlewomen's Stories in Marie de France's Lais and Later French Courtly Nar-
ratives, " in Singlewomen in the European Past, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).

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168 Yale French Studies

of order on disorder, and of heroism on villainy. This is not simply to

say that the triumph of good is dependent on challenges from evil, but
rather that within the brotherhood of knights, the ritualized repetition
of sacrifice and rescue keeps the definition of good and bad-of jus-
tice-within the family of men. And if, as Poirion has suggested, me-
dieval romance serves the function of myth, explaining social institu-
tions and their origins, the myth offered by Le conte du graal and other
chivalric romances is a story of social order established and guaranteed
by a chivalric justice enacted with royal authority.25 The blood drops
scene in Le conte du graal invites an interrogation of that myth, and
suggests that the valorization of chivalric identity as an eternal broth-
erhood defined, at least in part, by the rescue of ladies, constructs a
myth of social order that is grounded on the sacrifice of women.

25. See Poirion, "L'ombre mythique," 191-98.

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