This doctoral project aims to investigate the manuscript tradition of the Lancelot en prose, focusing in particular on the section known as the Charrette, with a view to preparing a new critical edition. Although the Charrette has been widely studied from a historical and literary perspective, it still lacks a detailed philological analysis. The two previous critical editions of the text are based respectively on the cladistic method (G. Hutchings, Le roman en prose de Lancelot du Lac. Le conte de la Charrette, 1938) and on the so-called base-manuscript method (A. Micha, Lancelot. Roman en prose du XIIIe siècle, vol. III, 1978).

The project intends to apply the stemmatic method rigorously, following the model developed for the critical edition of the Arthurian prose cycle Guiron le Courtois (L. Leonardi – R. Trachsler et al. (eds.), Il Ciclo di Guiron le Courtois. Romanzi in prosa del secolo XIII, 2020). It includes the collation of the 38 known witnesses of the Charrette on the basis of a series of carefully selected loci critici, to describe the relationships among the manuscripts by identifying monogenetic errors. Knowledge of the source text — Chrétien de Troyes’s verse romance Le Chevalier de la Charrette — will make it possible to compare the two known redactions of the Charrette not only at the macrotextual level but also at the microtextual one. If supported by coherent data, this comparison could shed new light on the development and structure of the section. The study of the manuscript tradition will also make use of digital philology tools, such as XML text encoding for critical editions and the automatic transcription of witnesses.