When Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter kindly invited me to contribute a chapter on “Arthurian Ethics” to their Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, I attempted to sketch a “bare bones” framework that, rather than considering the particular moral regimes of specific works, would assist discussion and comparison of how ethical questions were treated across, in principle, the entire range of Arthurian works in different media and discourses, produced over the past millennium and still to come – and including critical writing about Arthurian works among the modes of Arthurian discourse. Such a task is clearly impossible, but I enjoyed the challenge (more below on the role of failure in Arthurian ethics). I wanted, in particular, to outline some of the distinctive ways in which Arthurian works typically approach ethical questions: the kinds of things they construe to be “good” or “bad,” how they build the constructions through which they establish or question those values, and their attachment when doing so to particular narrative features (e.g. certain types of character, action, event, place, object, animal). I further aimed to sketch some of the characteristic parameters and scenarios in which ethical issues are both posed and debated in the Arthurian corpus: for instance, themes of loyalty and betrayal, adultery plots, or the decline-and-fall Mort ending that haunts some, though not all, Arthurian works. In writing this Foreword, I respond to the further kind invitation by Melissa Ridley Elmes and Evelyn Meyer to revisit my earlier chapter in the light of the essays contained in their excellent volume.

In “Arthurian Ethics,” I focused especially on the complex relationship to “real life” that seems to me core to the ways in which Arthurian works stage their ethical debates and to their constructions of ethical meaning. I approached this relationship through three heuristic analogies: temporal (“Arthurtime”), virtual (“Arthurlife”), and psychoanalytic (“the Arthurian scene”). By “Arthurtime,” I wanted to indicate both the timeframes in which Arthurian works are set and those in which practitioners (readers, viewers, writers, painters, critics, etc.) engage with such works; the time of reception is also distinctively Arthurian.

This chapter reviews how verse and prose romances in French and other Western European vernaculars developed through formal experimentation. Emphasizing the skill with which verse writers negotiated formal choices, the chapter analyses in detail the octosyllabic rhyming couplet that became the most common verse romance meter in several languages, before outlining the surprising variety of forms that distinguished Middle English romance. The complex relationship of form to genre – romance, epic, and lyric – in different linguistic and cultural contexts is also discussed, as is the virtuoso practice of inserting lyrics into verse romance narratives. The second half of the chapter describes the genesis and spread of romance writing in prose, now so ordinary as to seem a nonform, but once radically innovative and carrying a particular ideological freight. It analyses the “myth of prose,” which allowed prose romance writers to claim a truthfulness and objectivity for their form that they denied to verse. In spite of such claims, verse romance was nevertheless preferred in some languages and cultural contexts.

READING POLITICAL FICTIONs today, I am struck by how many of its arguments and ideas remain ground breaking. Some, it is true, have been absorbed into the critical mainstream. The chansons de geste are no longer viewed as vestigial, ‘popular’ survivals of primitive oral traditions that were superseded during the twelfth century by the sophisticated romance genre, but as self-conscious artworks and serious political theorising in a rich tradition that continues throughout the medieval period. Even before Kay brought to bear her characteristic blend of psychoanalysis and Marxism, building here especially on Fredric Jameson (1981) and on Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) to argue that chanson de geste and romance reveal each other's ‘political unconscious’, critics who worked extensively with chansons de geste knew that they entertain dialectical relationships with other genres and discourses and that their engagement with Islam, women, and alterity is multifaceted and complex; Kay drew notably on such scholarship in German and, to a lesser degree, in French. Nevertheless, the image of the ‘monologic’ song, always and only an epic celebration of white, Christian, western European, elite male warriors baying for the mass slaughter of dehumanised, homogenised ‘pagans’ – principally European and North African Muslims – continues to meet modern needs. Even a little research into the field shows that this stock summary of chanson de geste politics and poetics was long ago discredited by critical assessments that in the best cases manage to be nuanced and informed without being apologetic.

Some of the key ideas in Political Fictions, however, have been neither assimilated nor debated, including Kay's original thesis of the ‘poetics of the gift’. Drawing on feminist social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern's magisterial The Gender of the Gift (1988) and on the example of R. Howard Bloch's Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (1983), Kay develops the anthropological distinction between ‘commodity’ and ‘gift’ economies into large cultural paradigms that bear on both Old French literature and its modern reception.

Kay argues that critics today find medieval romances appealing because they adopt a ‘commodity’ poetics familiar to us: a single, ‘individual’, almost always masculine viewpoint negotiates a world of opaque ‘objects’ – things, words, and people – and worries about the adequacy of such objects to mediate between that viewpoint/individual and the world.

THIS VOLUME CELEBRATES the scholarship of Sarah Kay, one of the world's foremost scholars of medieval French. Kay's work combines methodological and theoretical rigour to explore medieval literary culture from new and challenging angles; her insights are always innovative and sometimes startling, and have played a major role in shaping our understanding of the field today. This introduction offers a brief overview of her career and publications in order to situate the essays in this book relative to her work. Not only has Kay's scholarship significantly shaped the field, the power of Kay's analyses and range of her materials are such that they attract audiences not usually attuned to medieval French literature. Therefore, and in keeping with Kay's publications, which address writing in Occitan, Catalan, Italian, and Latin as well as Old and Middle French and which maintain a consistent dialogue with other disciplines and periods, we aim to make this volume accessible to readers who are not specialists in medieval French literature, whether students of the French Middle Ages or advanced scholars in other fields.

Kay undertook her undergraduate and research degrees at Oxford, and a Masters degree in Linguistics at the University of Reading. At Oxford, she was taught by two inspirational women medievalists: Rhoda Sutherland, a remarkable teacher, and Elspeth Kennedy, a pioneering scholar of prose romance. Her first professional post was at the University of Liverpool, from where she moved to a university lectureship at Cambridge in the early 1980s. There, Kay became a Fellow of Girton College, where she later served as Senior Tutor (a major administrative post, involving responsibility for the education and welfare of the college's student population); she also undertook the role of Head of the University's Department of French. After two decades in Cambridge, Kay moved to Princeton in 2006 and then to New York University, where, as well as teaching and continuing to produce world-leading research, she held head of department and other influential leadership roles.

For this volume honouring Kay's scholarship, we invited twenty-four academics working across the disciplines of medieval studies to write in response to one of her six major monographs.