Our study of specular encounters has shown that in a considerable variety of narratives, featured individuals are placed before a mirror that reflects unsettling circumstances and aspects of selfhood. Although we have found the schema quite adaptable to multiple objectives, it in fact performs only a limited array of functions in our corpus. In essence, we have considered it from two complementary perspectives: as a schematic infrastructure, and in terms of the latter's varied manifestations within a few basic functional spheres. In all of the lais of Marie de France it is accessory to establishment of intersubjective reciprocity; in Chrétien's romances and Le Bel Inconnu, it effects a midcourse reorientation, while in the Prose Lancelot and contemporaneous Arthurian narratives it serves a variety of ends at many crucial junctures. On the other hand, following a tryst it hosts a retrospective analysis that is in some way specious, while also complicating the informant–addressee relation. And in a wide range of works, including many romances and brief narratives in verse and prose, it is the locus par excellence of disclosures concerning lineage and identity, as well as the fulcrum of what we have characterized as medieval “family romance.”

In the preceding chapters we have addressed the schema over a lengthy, remarkably fertile period that saw the phenomenal proliferation of many vernacular narrative types. To round out the inquiry, a few more general observations are in order.