Yde et Olive

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Yde et Olive is a thirteenth-century chanson de geste written in decasyllabic monorhyming laisses in a Picard-influenced dialect of Old French. It is one episode in a cycle of sequels to Huon de Bordeaux that follow various members of his family. Following the Chanson d'Esclarmonde, the story of Huon's wife and Yde's grandmother, and Clarisse et Florent, the story of Yde's parents, the story of Yde is punctuated by a poem titled Croissant, which some scholars edit separately and which tells the story of Yde and Olive's son. The main story of Yde's adventures then picks up again. "Yde et Olive" is a relatively unstudied chanson compared with its counterparts in the Huon series.

It is sometimes considered the earliest Old French adaptation of the myth of Iphis in Ovid's Metamorphoses, though some scholars have questioned whether this ancient cognate is anything more than coincidentally similar.^[1] Likewise, it has been postulated that the story was worked into dramatic form in the Miracle de la fille d'un roy (1454), but scholars have also rejected this hypothesis, claiming that the transference of the motif of a cross-dressing heroine escaping her father's incestuous desires results from an oral tradition rather than direct textual influence.^[2] The play does not significantly deviate from the chanson except in its finale (the heroine Ysabelle's true sex is discovered at the end, where she restored to womanhood and married to the king instead of remaining married to his daughter). Caroline Cazanave's quintessential book^[3] on the Huon sequels contains an extensive discussion of the text and the manuscript tradition.