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In the mid-fifteenth century, an anonymous writer connected to Philip the Good’s court adapted Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligés (c. 1176) to suit the tastes and interests of his Burgundian contemporaries. The decision to adapt Cligés for such an audience was logical: it is quite unlike Chrétien’s other romances, for it features two wars and two major tournaments, accounting for roughly 30% of both versions of the romance, although that percentage is more striking in the prose, which is considerably shorter than its verse model. In both works, the description of the combat scenes in the wars is interlaced with passages chronicling the nascent passion between the hero and his lady: Alexandre/Soredamors, in the first part of the romance, and Cligés/Fenice, in the second part. The prosateur’s keen interest in describing combat for a mid-fifteenth-century audience steeped in war culture is obvious, however, when we note how much more space he devotes to these action scenes than to the love intrigue and how many more striking details he provides than does Chrétien. Although we do not know how the prose Cligés was received at Philip’s court, we can well imagine that this work, which highlights war and the tournaments that imitate it, would have appealed greatly to an audience that had experienced a nearly constant state of warfare by the mid-fifteenth century, including the Hundred Years War and the duke’s incessant efforts to expand his domain and keep peace within it. The greater emphasis on war in this romance (compared to Chrétien’s Cligés) can thus be attributed partly to the process of ’’acculturation’’.

When we compare the prose redactor’s treatment of combat with Chrétien’s, we can see that the prose Cligés is not simply a pale or maladroit imitation of its model, as early scholars thought, but rather a very skilful adaptation, involving significant changes both in emphasis and in detail.

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