By the late twelfth century, when Jean Bodel describes contemporary literature as comprising ‘trois materes … de France de Bretaigne et de Ronme la grant’, the ‘matter of Britain’ had clearly distinguished itself from the chansons de geste and romans d'antiquité that he finds more authentic and didactic. He contrasts the matière de Bretagne as pure entertainment, delineating in a stroke the widely disseminated and influential works that take Brittany (construed as Britain as well as the French province) as their inspiration. This includes those that use the blurred geography of Bretagne for local colour (as in the short narrative lais, or quick shorthand allusions in lyric poetry), and romances that evoke such figures as King Arthur, his knights, and Tristan and Iseult. This broad category burgeoned rapidly into a complex metafiction enfolding some of the most memorable literature of the High Middle Ages, beginning in the second half of the twelfth century with Wace's Roman de Brut, the works of Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France's Lais, and the Tristan romances of Thomas and Béroul. From the late twelfth through the thirteenth century, verse romances proliferate, accompanied by the adaptation and vast expansion of central narratives into prose, principally in the Didot-Perceval, the monumental Vulgate and Post-Vulgate Cycles, and the Prose Tristan. In addition, a host of named and anonymous authors propagate the individual and collective adventures of key characters at Arthur's court, chiefly Gawain (La Mule sans frein; Le Chevalier à l'épée; Hunbaut; La Vengeance Raguidel; L'Âtre périlleux), Perceval (the Continuations; Perlesvaus) and Tristan (La Folie de Berne and La Folie d'Oxford, and in more episodic form embedded in the Donnei des amanz and Gerbert de Montreuil's Continuation of Perceval).