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À l’orée du XIIIe siècle, Joseph d’Arimathie fait son entrée dans les romans du Graal. Lors la mise au tombeau du Christ, il aurait recueilli le saint sang dans un Vessel dont nous connaissons la postérité. L’étude d’un tel personnage permet d’interroger les liens que peut entretenir le corpus graalien avec les Écritures. La figure biblique fait entrer le Graal dans l’Histoire sainte. Par sa présence, les œuvres prétendent éclairer des vérités chrétiennes tout en restant malgré tout des fictions. Dès lors, le statut du personnage demande à être précisé. Acquiert-il des caractéristiques romanesques ? Dans quelle mesure réfère-t-il aux temps de la Passion mais aussi au monde arthurien ? Ces questions n’appellent pas toujours les mêmes réponses. Joseph d’Arimathie garantit l’unité des romans du Graal tout en instaurant des différences entre eux. Son histoire et sa poétique varient et reflètent par leurs changements les enjeux de chaque œuvre. Elles donnent à voir comment la prose se distingue du vers et comment la matière de Judée prend une forme nouvelle dans les textes graaliens. Les auteurs assument une prétention à dire vrai et à écrire l’Histoire tout en l’adaptant aux besoins du récit et d’un lectorat aristocratique. Instrument de légitimation du fait son origine biblique, Joseph d’Arimathie valorise le roman. Il révèle également comment l’aristocratie laïque reprend et infléchit le discours des clercs à son propre compte afin de s’accorder une nouvelle place dans le domaine spirituel. Il en ressort que le personnage répond à des enjeux tout à la fois poétiques, littéraires et sociohistoriques qu’il convient de mettre en lumière. / In the early XIIIth century, Joseph of Arimathea starts making an appearance in the Holy Grail stories. When Christ was laid to rest, Joseph of Arimathea is supposed to have collected the Holy Blood in a Vessel whose posterity is well-known. The study of such a historical figure leads us to assess how intertwined the Grail corpus and the Scriptures can be. The biblical figure ushers the Grail into the Sacred History. Through his existence, the literary works mean to highlight some Christian truths while eventually remaining works of fiction. From then on, the status of the character calls for clarification. Does he get bestowed with fictional features ? To what extent does he relate to the time of Passion as well as to the Arthurian legends ? These questions do not always call for the same type of answer. Joseph of Arimathea safeguards the unity of the Grail Romances, while delineating differences between them. His life story and poetic persona vary and these changes reflect the literary intent in each of the literary works. They go to show the distinction between prose and verse and how the Judea matter takes a new shape in the Grail texts. The authors claim responsibility for stating the truth and for recording History, while adjusting to the requirements of the narrative and to their upper-class readership. Thanks to his biblical origin, Joseph of Arimathea is instrumental in giving legitimacy to the story, thereby giving it additional value. He also reveals how the secular aristocracy take up and inflect the clerics’ discourse to their own benefit, in order to grant themselves a new stance in the spiritual real. What is emerging is that this figure invites various levels of analysis, be they of poetic, literary and socio-historical nature, which all need to be brought to light.

<p>This study presents a new reading of the <i>Perlesvaus</i>, an anonymous thirteenth-century Old French Grail romance bizarrely structured around an Arthurian restaging of the battle between the Old and the New Law. I construe this hyper-violent, phantasmagorical text as a profoundly significant work of “trauma fiction” encoding a hitherto-unrecognized crisis of religious ethics and identity in Western Europe in the first half of the thirteenth century. Combining literary and historical analysis and drawing on current trends in trauma studies, I tie what I term the “deranged discourse” of the <i>Perlesvaus</i> to the brutal onset of internal crusading in southern France (the papal-sponsored Albigensian Crusade, 1209-29), making the case that the collective trauma staged in its narrative perturbations was a contributing factor in the well-documented worsening of Western European antisemitism during this period. One key analytical construct I develop is the “doppelganger Jew”—personified in the <i>Perlesvaus</i> by its schizoid authority figure, Josephus, a conflation of first Christian priest and first-century Romano-Jewish historian—who functions as an uncanny embodiment of powerful, unacknowledged fears that Christians were losing their spiritual moorings and reverting into reviled, scapegoated Jews. Traces of this collective trauma are explored in other contemporary texts, and one chapter examines how the fourteenth-century <i>Book of John Mandeville</i> revives similar fears of collapsing Judeo-Christian identity and unfolds under the sign of the doppelganger Jew.</p>