A mute, inscrutable figure, seemingly unaware of where – or even of who – he is, moves through an alien, inhospitable terrain whose stylized features are uncannily familiar yet offer no clue as to the identity of either person or place. This enigmatic scene might occur in a nouveau roman; one thinks for example of the lone soldier wandering the streets of an unknown city in Robbe-Grillet's Dans le labyrinthe. But with only a few substitutions – of a sylvan wilderness for a cityscape, of a knight-errant for the urban itinerant – we find ourselves in the remote strangeness of medieval romance. Such commensurability of medieval and postmodern fictions is only temporary, however; for while the soldier will forever remain, both to himself and to the reader, unnamable and unknowable, the knight is undoubtedly on the verge of making a most extraordinary discovery concerning his own identity and the profound import of his errantry. Moreover, this will most likely stem from a dramatic encounter with the purveyor of an unanticipated disclosure. Sporadically, such moments occur elsewhere in world literature. In medieval French narrative these “functions of identity” are particularly numerous, however, and though the texts that incorporate them vary considerably in genre and subject matter, their salient characteristics are remarkably stable: typically the encounter befalls a prominent personage, like the knight-errant of the above example, who is confronted with matters of the utmost importance regarding his or her own self or situation, as these are reported back by an agency that we shall call the “informant,” whether this be another individual, a voice, or a representation.