Meraugis de Portlesguez is an Arthurian verse romance of nearly 6000 lines that was most probably composed in the early 13th century. Its author, Raoul de Houdenc, is thought to have been a minor nobleman and professional military man who was also the nephew of a famous churchman, Peter the Chanter. Beginning with the conflict between two friends who love the same woman, one for her beauty and the other (the eponymous hero) for her courtliness, the romance follows the tentative formation of a couple and the subsequent testing of the hero, his struggles, mistakes, and eventual success, treating in the process such themes as the nature of love and the proper relationship between the individual and the community. One of a number of so-called "epigones" of the master romancer Chretien de Troyes, and perhaps the most successful among them, Raoul de Houdenc owes much to his famous predecessor while at the same time producing an innovative and entertaining work of unique perspective and substantial literary merit.
As this text is unique, so the present edition is the result of a unique set of circumstances. Meraugis de Portlesguez has been preserved in three complete manuscripts and two fragments. Its first critical edition appeared in 1897, the work of the German scholar Mathias Friedwagner using the Lachmann method. From the stemma he constructed, Friedwagner concluded that the Vatican manuscript, or V, was the closest to the original text of the three complete manuscripts, and he therefore used it as the basis for his edition, which also included an extensive list of variants from all manuscripts. In a review of this edition, however, Gaston Paris expressed the opinion, backed up by numerous examples, that the Turin manuscript, or T, though a later copy than the others, was closest to the original text, and he suggested ways of improving the edition based on it. The Turin manuscript sustained heavy damage from the fire that swept through the Biblioteca Nazionale in 1904, so that much of it is now illegible. As a result, later editors, although taking Gaston Paris's recommendations into account, have unsurprisingly used V rather than T as the basis for their editions. Because of the work of Mathias Friedwagner, however, it has been possible to reconstruct most of the content of the Turin manuscript and produce a satisfactory, albeit imperfect, critical edition with T as the base. The resulting edition--presented here with an introduction, translation, notes, critical apparatus, glossary, and index of proper names--makes the nuances of this important manuscript more easily accessible to scholars than has previously been possible and thus provides a supplement to the other editions of this major work.