Abstract

This article reassesses the often derided medieval author Thomas Chestre, as well as his tail-rhyme romance Lybeaus Desconus. It argues that while Chestre’s Lybeaus retains basic features and story lines of its source, the French Li Biaus Desconeüs by Renaud de Beaujeu, it simultaneously contradicts and challenges the authority of the source, seeking to establish its own place within the romance genre rather than be subordinate to generic ideals. Chestre rewrites his hero, establishing a new standard for knightly success: youth and inexperience become as acceptable as the romance conventions of maturity and experience. For Chestre, the process of rewriting the hero, and thus the genre, demonstrates that the idealized French culture epitomized by the courtly medieval romance is not superior, especially to English literary language or culture, and, as he retells the story of the fair unknown, he participates in a process that can be described as the political ‘Englishing’ of a French text.