“A knight”, said the Damsel, “must possess many qualifications. If you hear what they are, you will tremble.”
“He must be singularly devoid of good qualities,” said Lancelot, “whom the fear of obligations prevents from becoming a knight.”
“I think a man may possess qualities of the heart, and lack those of the body. For while the latter are innate, he may acquire the former by effort and perseverance.”
“What is there in chivalry to prevent one from aspiring to it?”
Le Livre de Lancelot du Lac
The Lancelot-Grail Cycle or the Vulgate Cycle is an incredibly long and ambitious consolidation of a huge network of stories into one coherent storyline. It’s most notable in English for being a major source for Le Morte D’Arthur.
We don’t know its authors or compilers - though we can guess there’s several involved and it may have had several evolutions as pieces were added to it. The most notable set of these are the reworkings together known as the Post-Vulgate Cycle.
The work is linchpinned by its central story: Le Livre de Lancelot du Lac (the life of Lancelot of the Lake), which turns Lancelot into a key point of view for the audience to track as the story goes along1.
Because it was Morte D’Arthur’s base but is much longer, it can often serve as a buffet of additional detail to flesh out the Malory’s stories with. Many of the stories are the same, but with a lot more details, connections and filler. I don’t think it’s commonly used on its own, though, in English; it failed to catch on at the right time, is a lot denser to read, and the Old French language requires translations which are huge tasks given its size and thus expensive as hell2.
Footnotes
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Arguably the reason why he’s so famous today. Sir Gawaine seems to dominate almost all medieval works - showing up and stealing the show regardless of whose name is on the cover, even for Lancelot’s own stories. But (though he’s still a major presence here) he failed to take over the one story that would matter for the future. ↩
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Don’t ask me where I get all my quotes from. I’d love to get a nice accessible source like this if it wasn’t $400, though. ↩