Le topos du 'livre-source' dans les romans français du XIIe et XIIIe siècle

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the topos of the book intended as a model - namely the reference to a fictitious source (for example «com l’estoire dist, il est verités») - in Twelfth and Thirteenth-Centuries French romances : in order to justify his assertions, the poet refers to a generic and indefinite source as an auctoritas. The first section of the thesis (chapter I) defines the research field and establishes the methodology adopted for this survey by studying the development of this topos in a series of selected texts. This section gives also an overview of the literary gender, defines the chronological boundaries of the study and shows the evolution of the topos in Medieval French literature. The second section of the dissertation, consisting of two chapters (II and III), analyzes the problematic notion of this topos, explores in depth the declarations concerning the sources and examines the textual tradition. The second chapter studies the Old French ‘matière d’Alexandre’ from Auberi’s Alexandre to the venjeances, while the third chapter focuses on the ‘problematic notion of source’ in the Roman de Thèbes and in the Roman de Troie. The Appendix contains a stylistic study of two borrowings from Ovid translated and abridged in the Roman d’Alexandre (the stories of Narcissus and Arachnes) which are claimed to be taken from an unknown source by using the topos of the ‘model book’. The sections ‘Fiches’ and ‘Tables’ are a formalisation of materials examined in chapters II-III. The study provides two indexes and is accompanied by bibliography.