May 12, 2006
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass.—Paul V. Rockwell, professor of French at Amherst College, is the editor of Le Chevalier as deus espees: A Critical Edition and Translation ($90, Boydell & Brewer Ltd., Suffolk U.K. 2006).
Le Chevalier as deus espees, “The knight with the two swords” in English, is the hero of an anonymous Arthurian romance that belongs to a cluster of French verse works composed in England during the first decades of the 13th century; its author and audience were presumably among the baronial immigrants from the western regions of France who had lost their continental holdings to Philip Augustus. It presents an inter-textual response to various problems raised in Chrétien de Troyes’s Roman de Perceval, with its interlaced adventures containing some of the most subtle rewriting of Arthurian material known from this period.
Rockwell’s volume, offering a text and facing translation, represents the only dual-language edition of the romance and the first critical edition to be published since the 19thcentury; it also includes an introduction, notes and bibliography.
A member of the Amherst faculty since 1988, Rockwell has a B.A. in comparative literature and French, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in French from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His book Rewriting Resemblance in Medieval French Romance: Ceci n’est pas un graal was published in 1995.
###