If there is a founding author not only of French literature but of medieval vernacular literature in general, it is Chrétien de Troyes, who largely inaugurated the genre of Arthurian romance and in so doing launched an entire literary tradition that has spanned more than eight centuries. Among the finest works of medieval French poetry, Chrétien's romances, composed in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, and ranging in length from approximately 6,500 to 9,300 verses, gave rise to copious and divergent Old French continuations in verse and prose.

As with most vernacular authors of the twelfth century, Chrétien's life is generally undocumented, although scholars have developed a variety of intriguing speculations on his identity based on internal and external evidence. Given his uncommon name, it has been suggested that Chrétien was a converted Jew from Troyes, the capital of the counts of Champagne and a...