In 1170, the date commonly accepted for the composition of Erec et Enide (the first Arthurian romance), French literature began to rival literature from the Latin tradition. The defining cultural trait of the Middle Ages was, in fact, bilingualism, the coexistence of Latin and the vernacular languages. But until the end of the eleventh century, the only written language was Latin. It was the privilege of clerics to have access to learned culture, essentially represented by apologetics and literature from Latin Antiquity. And let us not forget that, during the Carolingian cultural renaissance, the growth of literature in the eighth and ninth centuries was limited to Latin texts.

The first written trace of the development of vernacular languages was offered by the famous Strasbourg Oaths, sworn in 842 by Charlemagne's grandsons – one, by Charles II (the Bald), in French, the other, by Louis the German, in German – in the presence of their troops (of course, this document is not a literary text). Next came several texts – Latin religious poems translated into French – intended for the edification of the faithful. Among them are hagiographic poems such as La Cantilene de sainte Eulalie (c. 880) and La Vie de saint Alexis (eleventh century).

But the second medieval cultural renaissance, the true birth of French literature, began around 1100 with the rise to power of the chivalric class. The nobility represented the dominant class, unified by the relationship of one man to another (the feudal system) around a common ideology. Courts were developing during this era as well. The court of the King of France was not yet an important cultural centre, unlike those of his great vassals, particularly the court of London. Henry Plantagenet, Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy, extended his power over Aquitaine by his marriage to Eleanor in 1152 (following her repudiation by her first husband, Louis VII of France) and became king of England in 1154. A new aristocratic and secular culture began to express itself through a new form of literature, destined for laymen, the ‘illiterati’ (those who did not know Latin), and thus composed in the vernacular, which became both a written and literary language. Clerics in the service of princes were to express in their texts the aspirations of the chivalric class, and of the three orders of society – the priesthood or oratores, the nobility or bellatores and the peasantry or laboratores – they would glorify the martial. Thus, martial values hold a dominant place in this literature, along with the values of courtly society, which developed at the same time.