Early on, we took to calling ourselves “Chrétien Girls.” This senhal or nom de plume accompanied us throughout our collaboration, creating a disposable, collective, authorial persona that made it possible to agree on the meanings, effects and affects of a collaboration. This collaboration, however, could not have been accomplished without generous funding from various institutions. The Chrétien Girls would like to thank the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study for supporting an Exploratory Seminar, our first workshop meeting held in May 2007, and the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies whose CMRS Ahmanson Conference grant made possible our second workshop held at the University of California, Los Angeles, in January 2008. Lastly, we thank the Department of French and Italian at Princeton University and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University for financial assistance with the publication of this volume.

Note on Editions and Translations

Citations of Erec et Enide are from the edition by Jean-Marie Fritz (1992); Le Chevalier de la Charrette is cited from Charles Méla's edition (1992); and for Le Chevalier au lion, we used David Hult's edition (1994); all three are republished with occasional corrections in Chrétien de Troyes, Romans, suivis des chansons, avec, en appendice, Philomena (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1994). Cligés and Le Conte du graal are cited from the critical editions by, respectively, Stuart Gregory and Claude Luttrell (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993) and Keith Busby (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993).