Chrétien's romances enjoyed a huge success almost immediately after being written. They were copied, imitated, transposed, quoted broadly and consistently throughout the thirteenth century in French-speaking domains. Two of them, the Chevalier de la Charrette and the Conte du Graal, were used extensively (with major adjustments) in the Arthurian prose cycles. The transposition of the Charrette into the prose Lancelot especially testifies to the perfect familiarity with Chrétien's romances shared by prose writers and their audiences. But this familiarity also meant that French writers did not try to adapt them stricto sensu.

The situation was quite different outside France, where some writers – but not their public – could read French and gain direct access to Chrétien's romances. One of the clearest signs of Chrétien's spreading fame is that, very early on, his romances were deemed worth translating. German, Dutch, Norse, Swedish, English translations and/or adaptations were composed before and during the first half of the fourteenth century. Only three of Chrétien's romances, however, gained fame abroad: Erec, Yvain and Perceval, the most popular being Yvain. This is all the more striking because Erec and Yvain were precisely those of Chrétien's heroes whom his French epigones (imitators) tended to ignore. Yet the reason they were favoured outside France is probably the same reason they were avoided by French-speaking writers: masterly in composition, morally satisfactory, these romances embodied the spirit of courtly life. They represented the highest achievement in the art of romance. French authors could not dream of rewriting these stories, but foreign writers could appropriate them. Yet these adapters did not feel constrained to imitate their models slavishly. Indeed, while they often closely followed the plot line, they introduced many changes to reorient interpretation. They tended to motivate situations more thoroughly and to clarify what remained ambiguous and obscure in the original work (a feature that later French adaptations exhibit as well). Fully aware of the audiences they were addressing, they reshaped the romances in order to meet the expectations of their public and to convey their own understanding of the story.

The case of the Perceval is different: Chrétien's work was fragmentary; it raised many questions that the adapters, like their French counterparts, tackled as best they could. It is rather the romance's incompleteness and enigmatic quality that appealed to them, as those qualities also fascinated Chrétien's continuators in French.