Refashioning combat in Chrétien’s Cligés for the Burgundian court

In 1455 an anonymous prose writer adapted Chrétien de ­Troyes’ Cligés (1176). Seeking no doubt to appeal to his Burgundian ­contemporaries steeped in war ­culture, he made the ­combat scenes much more vivid and detailed while ­condensing the love intrigue. This article ­compares the verse and prose accounts of ­Cligés’s performance at two moments in his evolution, as a novice in the war waged by the duke of Saxony and as a more experienced knight in a tournament organized by King Arthur.