El reflejo de la sociedad medieval a través de la lectura de los textos tristanianosun nuevo reto de acercamiento al pasado para el lector moderno

Resum

By means of this essay, we would like to pinpoint the social portrait that Medieval Literature normally shows from a cultural and historical point of view. We would like to point out as well the way of conceiving the act of reading as a public event during the Middle Ages in order to show the difference with our way of understanding the reading event nowedays. So as to achieve these goals, we have taken into consideration some of the most representative versions (such as Béroul’s, Thomas’s or Gottfried Von Strassbourg’s ones) of the Tristan material because of its fidelity with the social portrait of France during the Middle Ages. We could say that Medieval Literature turns into a very good procedure to get some knowledge of the extreme importance of society in creating literature and reading it at the beginning of the twenty first century implies a great challenge for the actual reader. On balance, we would like to remark with this small meditation about Tristan that literature is highly related to society so the reading event should be one of the most accurate ways of learning our social identities in the past. We would like to highlight as well that the act of reading was born as a social need so we should not avoid it if we do not want our imagination to be reduced to nothing or just to be a high-tech product (such as television, Internet, etc.).