The main part of this chapter will be concerned with two versions of the same story, a Breton lay or short romance whose plot turns on two scenes where a woman manifests her magical power by displaying her beauty to the male gaze. The versions differ interestingly, not only because one is in twelfth-century French and the other in fourteenth-century English, but also because the first, Lanval, is by a woman, Marie de France, and the second, Sir Launfal, by a man, Thomas Chestre. As a postscript, I add a brief discussion of another short romance, this time from thirteenth-century France, La Chastelaine de Vergi, that tells a somewhat similar story, but in a secularized and tragic form; here the supernatural is entirely absent, and the question of looking is displaced on to the epistemology of narrative.

Marie de France, one of the few identifiably female authors to have written secular poems in an early medieval vernacular language, probably belonged to the highest Anglo-Norman aristocracy. Lanval is the only Arthurian tale in a collection of twelve lays which she claims to have adapted from stories sung by the Bretons; from this it was extracted and twice translated into Middle English. One version is the anonymous early fourteenth-century Sir Landevale, a close translation, surviving in five manuscripts, in the octosyllabic couplets of the original.