Background
He was born on 28 January in 1863 in Paris, France.
He was born on 28 January in 1863 in Paris, France.
From 1880 to 1903 Joseph taught successively at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), at the University of Caen, and at the ÉcoleEcole Normale Supérieure. Superieure. In 1903 he succeeded Gaston Paris in the chair of Old French Language and Literature at the CollègeCollege de France. In 1921 he was elected to the French Academy and in 1929 became administrator of the CollègeCollege de France, a post which he retained until his retirement in 1936.BédierBedier died in Le Grand Serre (Drôme)(Drome) on Aug. 29, 1938.
Bédier'sBedier's first major work of scholarship was his doctoral thesis entitled Les Fabliaux, étudesetudes de littératurelitterature populaire et d'histoire littérairelitteraire du moyen âgeage (1893, reprinted in 1894 and in 1924), in which he opposed the then current theories of the Eastern origin of the narrative genre known as fabliaux and showed conclusively that it was a product of 13th-century France, closely related to the social and literary climate of the time. The success of this work was immediate, and placed BédierBedier in the forefront of the medievalists of his generation; but it was his next book, Le Roman de Tristan et Iseult (1900), a free reconstruction of the 12th-century romance of Tristan, that earned him world-wide fame as a writer. It was a masterpiece of French prose, in which scholarship and literary genius had an equal share. Two years later BédierBedier published the first volume of his edition of Le Roman de Tristan par Thomas (2 vols., 1902-1905), the most important contribution ever made to the study of the early forms of medieval romance. It established beyond any possibility of doubt that all the known versions of the Tristan story stemmed ultimately from the same lost original, a twelfth-century French poem, and not, as was previously believed, from an amorphous tradition of Celtic popular tales. A similar change of perspective was achieved in Bédier'sBedier's monumental Les LégendesLegendes épiquesepiques (4 vols., 1908-1913). His researches into the origins of Old French epic poems had convinced him that these were written long after the events which they described, certainly not earlier than the eleventh century, and that they could be localized along the routes of pilgrimage where they served to attract pilgrims to certain places of worship. Above all, they were products of individual poets, not of popular fancy. The culmination of Bédier'sBedier's study of the epic was his critical edition of the Chanson de Roland (1922). It was produced with a translation of the poem into modern French prose which, apart from the light it throws upon the text, is a poetic achievement of a high order. That BédierBedier transformed everything he touched is as true of his literary studies as of his writings upon problems of textual criticism. In a series of epoch-making contributions, starting with his introduction to Le Lai de l'Ombre (1913), he advocated a method free from the elaborate techniques of reconstruction used by earlier critics; and his own courageously conservative treatment of the unique surviving manuscript of the Chanson de Roland has since become a model of conscientious critical editing in all branches of literary history.
