Abstracts
This contribution studies the influence of the printing presses on the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century dynamics of a well-defined literary medieval genre, the French Arthurian romance, a corpus consisting of eleven texts first published between 1488 and 1530. The study sheds light particularly on some aspects of both the production and reception of these texts by answering questions such as: Which titles were selected by the printer from within the Arthurian genre? Which printers have been active protagonists in the textual transmission? In which editorial centres? What does their editorial production curve look like? Which kinds of readers bought these books? Towards the end, the study produces two comparative analyses in order to better grasp the peculiar characters of Arthurian editions, both in the French context and the wider European setting. First, French Arthurian publications are quantitatively compared with other medieval romances published in France. Second, the French Arthurian texts are compared to those published in other European countries in the sixteenth century.
