SEGURANT, THE DRAGON KNIGHT

Emanuele Arioli, Editor

LES BElles lettres, 272 pages, 2024

Rights sold into: German, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian

√ A major literary discovery

√ An extraordinary editorial saga

√ A brilliant translation

***To discover today (…) an unknown Arthurian tale is exceptional. [...] To reconstruct the whole story is a prodigy of erudition, intelligence and sensitivity.*** Michel Zink, medievalist

Surpassing all the knights of his time in strength and bravery, Segurant wins hands down every chivalry tournament he enters, until he is bewitched by the sorceress Morgana and the fairy Sibyl who send him in pursuit of a fire-breathing dragon.

Scattered across numerous medieval manuscripts, the extraordinary adventures of Ségurant, knight of the Round Table, were forgotten for more than seven centuries before being rediscovered by a young medievalist. Emanuele Arioli scoured libraries throughout Europe to piece together this long-forgotten Arthurian tale. Written in Old French, in the North of Italy during the 13th century, the adventures of the Dragon Knight were extremely popular and widely circulated in France and Italy as well Spain and Great Britain and subject to several extensions and rewriting.

After more than ten years of research and three scholarly books on the subject, Arioli now offers a modern French translation of this text, illustrated with the illuminations of the original manuscripts, so that everyone can, for the first time, read and enjoy the story of an unsung hero of the Round Table.

Emanuele Arioli is a Franco-Italian medievalist, archivist paleographer and currently Senior Researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Aside from his acclaimed reconstitution of Segurant, The Dragon Knight, he has published scholarly books on the subject at the academic publisher Honoré Champion.