Godefroi de Leigni

Godefroi de Leigni was a clerk and an associate of Chrétien de Troyes during the 12th century, presumably at the court of Marie de Champagne. He finished Chrétien's romance "Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart" after Chrétien abandoned it for unknown reasons.

Godefroi was presumably born in the village of Leigni, now called Ligny, in the modern Belgian province of Namur, or was at least intimately associated with it. Chrétien states at the beginning of "Lancelot" that Marie de Champagne had commissioned him to compose the poem, and Godefroi says at the end that with Chrétien's blessing, he had brought the work from line 6132, where Lancelot has been trapped behind a wall by Meleagant, to its conclusion some thousand lines later. There has been much speculation about why Chrétien left the poem where he did. Some suggest that he, Medieval France's greatest treater of married love, did not approve of the adulterous subject. Others hold that he was uninterested by a subject thrust upon him by his patroness, preferring to spend more time on "Yvain, the Knight of the Lion", a poem he wrote at the same time as "Lancelot".

It is not certain whether Godefroi was following an outline left by Chrétien when he completed the poem, as most scholars have tended to believe, or if his section represented his own inspiration. This could have implications on interpreting Chrétien's influence on later Arthurian literature (much of which deals with the abduction of Guinevere as it appears in "Lancelot").

French language scholar Roberta Krueger reads Godefroi more as an ironic scribal persona created by Chrétien himself and less as an actual writer commissioned to finish the text. She argues that Godefroi may be little more than a "fictional clerky author figure conceived by [Chrétien] " to "tie up" his adulterous love plot in a homosocial literary bond that craftily ignores the heterosexual tension the work has sought to create.

References

*Chrétien de Troyes, D.D.R. Owen (translator) (1988) "Arthurian Romances", Tuttle Publishing, reprinted by Everyman's Library. ISBN 0-460-87389-X
*Roberta Krueger, "Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance." Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993, p. 274, n. 44