. Written probably ca. 1182–85, Partonopeu de Blois is an enormous romance whose popularity is attested by its many medieval imitations, translations, and adaptations. Ten manuscripts feature three forms of the romance: V(Vatican, Palatinus latinus 1971) ends after 10,358 lines, with the marriage of Partonopeu and Melior, followed by the romancer’s promise to continue his story, if his lady so commands; A (Paris, Arsenal 2986) reworks that ending to eliminate any continuation; and five manuscripts offer selections from the Continuation (only Tours 939, with 14,493 lines, contains both the Anselot and the Sultan Margaris episodes).
The anonymous romancer combines elements from classical, Celtic, and oriental matter to shape the story of Partonopeu of Blois, the nephew of Clovis, king of France, and Melior, empress of Byzantium. Like the fairy mistresses of Celtic lais, Melior arranges to lure thirteen-year-old Partonopeu to Chef d’Oire (modeled on Constantinople), where she plans to keep him secretly for two and a half years, until he can be knighted and presented to her barons as a suitable husband. Partonopeu enjoys the pleasures of love with Melior each night, on condition that she remain invisible to him (the Cupid and Psyche story with sex roles reversed). But betrayal follows, and, once she has been seen, Melior’s magic powers are destroyed. Seeking death in the Ardennes Forest, Partonopeu is discovered by Urraque, Melior’s sister, who persuades him with false news of Melior’s pardon to go to Salence. There, Partonopeu recovers his health and prepares for the three-day tournament arranged by Melior’s barons to choose her husband. Winner of the tournament, for both his prowess and his beauty, Partonopeu is finally married to a forgiving Melior.
The Continuation offers two unsuccessful love stories, and the narrator tells us that he could write yet another book about the goodness of his lady, Passe-Rose. His desire to win her love motivates the entire romance project and appears in many personal interventions, when he compares the characters’ love story and his own.
This lyric persona of the narrator, one of the major innovations of Partonopeu, begins with the springtime opening evoked in the prologue. The genealogy that follows, linking the French monarchy to Trojan ancestors, establishes the narrator in the clerkly tradition of romance writing as well. Chansons de geste, Romances of Antiquity, lais, Chrétien de Troyes’s romances, contemporary travelogues, bestiaries, school debates—the author of Partonopeu de Blois exploits and reinvents all the literary and historical resources of his day. Reflecting the medieval view of fabulous Byzantium, where goods, peoples, religions, and cultures meet in a rich mix, this romance fuses the real and the marvelous, combines fantasies of the East and lessons on contemporary French politics, as it prolongs the pleasure of a love story skillfully told and enticingly opened to the public’s desire for more. A measure of its success can be calculated by the translations of Partonopeu into English, Spanish, German, Icelandic, Dutch, and Danish between the 13th and early 16th centuries.
