Parzival

Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival tells in Middle High German verse the coming-of-age story (Bildungsroman} of Parzival, the new King of the Holy Grail. Wolfram wrote Parzival probably in the first decade of the thirteenth century. He drew extensively on Chrétien de Troyes’s late twelfth-century Old French verse romance Perceval or the Story of the Grail {Perceval ou le Conte du Graal}. Parzival became a widely known and influential Arthurian romance. At least eighty manuscripts of it have survived. Parzival is a seminal work for understanding castration culture and men’s subordination to women under the ideology of courtly love.