Elemente christlicher Spiritualität im altfranzösischen Gralskorpus

The romances of the Old French Grail-cycle are often represented in literary history as a homogenous corpus, the focus concentrating mostly on aesthetic and poetological issues. The social and cultural disruptions of their time of origin remain largely neglected. Religious motives are usually relegated to the area of mythology or assessed according the criteria of Christian dogmatics. This study aims at locating four important grail romances that originated during the „Axial Age“ (Jaspers/Toynbee) of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the context of the history of mentalities. It tries to detect in these romances traces of medieval monastic culture, of influences of the canon regular’s movement, of modes of thinking in the vein of pre-scholastic erudition, of forms of mystic religiousness, of manifestations of lay-spirituality and of an emerging women’s movement. It becomes evident that the authors of the four romances drew from quite different sources of inspiration. Correspondingly, their literary as well as their religious messages are articulated in different ways.