![]() Accordingly, his father ordered the Viscount to send Nicolette away, but instead the Viscount locked her in a tower of his palace. It recounts the tale of Aucassin, son of Count Garin of Beaucaire, who so loved Nicolette, a Saracen maiden, who had been sold to the Viscount of Beaucaire, baptized and adopted by him, that he had forsaken knighthood and chivalry and even refused to defend his father's territories from enemies. The story begins with a song which serves as prologue and then prose takes up the narrative. Aucassin et Nicolette is the only known chantefable, the term itself having been derived from the story's concluding lines: "No cantefable prent fin" ("Our chantefable is drawing to a close"). Stylistically, the chantefable combines elements of many Old French genres, such as the chanson de geste (e.g., The Song of Roland), lyric poems, and courtly novels-literary forms already well-established by the 12th century. The work probably dates from the late 12th or early 13th century, and is known from only one surviving manuscript, discovered in 1752 by medievalist Jean-Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye ( BnF, Fonds Français 2168). ![]() ![]() ![]() It is the unique example of a chantefable, literally, a "sung story", a combination of prose and verse (similar to a prosimetrum). Aucassin and Nicolette, 19th-century oil-on-canvas by Marianne StokesĪucassin et Nicolette (12th or 13th century) is an anonymous medieval French fictional story. ![]()
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