The Ethics of Election in the Queste del Saint Graal

Galaad (Galahad), the saintly hero of the thirteenth-century Old French Queste del Saint Graal, is from one perspective an abstract Christ-figure whose actions and meaning are predetermined by divine providence and allegorical interpretation. However, throughout Galaad’s Grail quest, the romance also cultivates an antithetical resistance to totalizing allegoresis. It insists that the hero’s exploits and their sacred significance are contingent on his ethical agency and therefore on a personal virtue that remains constantly at stake, especially in the readerly activity of negotiating between the material surface of the world (and the text) and its possible meanings. The Queste thus uses Galaad to emplot, in a way characteristic of fictional romance narrative, the theological aporia of divine grace’s coexistence with human free will.