Introduction

If you mention the name of Minnette Gaudet to scholars of Old French, their first reaction—both rightly and wrongly—will usually be to think of the 1980 Special Issue of French Forum entitled The Nature of Medieval Narrative. Rightly, because the volume, which Minnette co-edited and which grew out of a conference held at the University of Western Ontario in 1977, proved to be a watershed for the encounter between narrative theory or narratology and medieval literature. Most students of medieval literature have in their personal library a dog-eared, much-perused copy of that collection of essays (in my case and, I suspect, in that of many others who were students when the volume came out, this consists of a copyright-violating xerox). But at the same time medievalists wrongly think so quickly of the Medieval Narrative volume for the simple reason that twenty-five years later too many scholars associate Minnette's name more readily with that volume than with her volume (s) of more recent work. Like the artist or actor who is too successful in a particular mode (Braque's cubist period or Bogey in his heyday), Minnette has occasionally had to wriggle out from under the success of her own work.