Summary: | This study intends to examine the experience of conversion in the High Books of the Grail in prose, from a rhetorical and poetic perspective. To achieve this, it sets the hypothesis that all these novels develop a common type of poetics, despite their huge variety, and defends the idea that such a kind of poetics could be very close to the one exposed by Geoffroy of Vinsauf in his Poetria Nova : the necessity to give voice to the Cross in order to convert the reader. This work will refer to the Poetria Nova as well as to the writings of St Bernard and of Cesarius of Heisterbach, in order to understand the shape and implications of the experience of conversion, at the turn of the XIIth century.
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