and 1544, and were shelved with the Arthurian romances. The romance was known and referred to in 14th-century England. Perceforest, like other late chivalric romances, was vaguely remembered but largely unread until the late 20th century. This was due not only to its time period but to its length. Each of its six books runs as many pages as a long novel, and the whole work is divided into about 530 chapters, totalling over a million words. If completely translated into English the work would run about 7,000 pages. Therefore, it was earlier and High Medieval literature that took centre stage in modern medieval studies. Moreover, readers of the Age of Enlightenment were not always delighted with Perceforest when they came upon it. The hero of Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), an early example of the Gothic novel, confesses that "Donna Rodolpha's Library was principally composed of old Spanish Romances: these were her favourite studies, and once a day one of these unmerciful volumes was put regularly into my hands. I read the wearisome adventures of Perceforest, Tirante the White, Palmerin of England and The Knight of the Sun till the Book was on the point of falling from my hands through Ennui." Gérard de Nerval, in a fictional letter published as part of his Angélique (1850), tells of an antiquary who fears for the safety of the valuable first printed edition of Perceforest at the hands of a rioting mob. References Myriam Yvonne Jehenson, "Quixotic Desires or Stark Reality?", the "Sleeping Beauty" episode mentioned. Dr Helen Nicholson, "What was a Medieval woman?", includes excerpts. Gilles Roussineau, Le Roman de Perceforest, 2001, . Roussineau identified the Perceforest origins of "Sleeping Beauty" in "Tradition Littéraire et Culture Populaire dans L'Histoire de Troilus et de Zellandine (Perceforest, Troisième partie): Version Ancienne du Conte de la Belle au Bois Dormant," in Arthuriana (Spring 1994): pp30 – 45. Mihaela Voicu, Histoire de la littérature française du moyen âge, xii.1, Bucharest, 2003 e-text (in French) Les pièces lyriques du roman de Perceforest, éd. Jeanne Lods, Genève, Droz (Publications romanes et françaises, 36), 1953 Le roman de Perceforest, Première partie, éd. Jane H. M. Taylor, Genève, Droz (Textes littéraires français, 279), 1979, Perceforest, Quatrième partie, tome I, éd. Gilles Roussineau, Genève, Droz (Textes littéraires français, 343), 1987 Perceforest. Troisième partie, tome I, éd. Gilles Roussineau, Genève, Droz (Textes littéraires français, 365), 1988 Perceforest. Troisième partie, tome