Roberta Krueger, the Burgess Professor of French, recently published “Antoine de la Sale’s Petit Jehan de Saintré and the Comte de Tressan: Libertinage, gallantry and French identity in an eighteenth-century adaptation” in Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanists (Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies).
The article analyzes the way an 18th-century aristocratic author adapts a lengthy medieval didactic romance into a sentimental fiction glorifying the military and amorous exploits of a French nobleman. Krueger said “Tressan’s popular novel reveals far more about 18th-century sensibilities than it does about medieval chivalry.”
