AUTHOR
Deborah Seiler
The University of Western Australia
The fourteenth century Breton lai Sir Launfal, written by Thomas Chestre, has been approached from several different direction: honour, gender, knightly ideals, just to name a few; trust, however, has not yet been employed to look at the lai. As a category of historical analysis, trust is very promising, as it is inherent in all human relationships. In Sir Launfal, Chestre uses trust – expressed through wealth and the lack of it – to highlight Launfal’s inherent worth. By formulating a context-based definition of trust, and then applying it to the text of Sir Launfal, this article shows that trust can be a useful category for historical analysis.