Godefroi de Leigni

Who is Godefroi de Leigni?

Godefroi de Leigni was a clerk and an associate of Chrétien de Troyes during the 12th century, presumably at the court of Marie de Champagne. He finished Chrétien's romance Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart after Chrétien abandoned it for unknown reasons.

Godefroi was presumably born in the village of Leigni, now called Ligny, in the modern Belgian province of Namur, or was at least intimately associated with it. Chrétien states at the beginning of Lancelot that Marie de Champagne had commissioned him to compose the poem, and Godefroi says at the end that with Chrétien's blessing, he had brought the work from line 6132, where Lancelot has been trapped behind a wall by Meleagant, to its conclusion some thousand lines later.

Most scholars have tended to believe Godefroi when he says he was following an outline left by Chrétien when he completed the poem. However in 1989, David Hult advanced "the possibility that Godefroi is a fiction of Chrétien." Roberta Krueger also reads Godefroi as a scribal persona created by Chrétien himself, a "fictional clerky author figure conceived by [Chrétien]" to "tie up" his adulterous love plot in a homosocial literary bond that craftily ignores the heterosexual tension the work has sought to create.