Chrétien de Troyes "politically correct". Questioni di genere nell’espressione della totalità tra grammatica, retorica e metrica

This article demonstrates that Chrétien de Troyes was the first to use male/female gender pairs (eg. tuit et totes, chascune et chascune) systematically to indicate totality. His solution fits the frequent use of synonymic dittology (originally based on metrics and rhetoric) in medieval romance. The use of complementary antonymic expressions (vieil et juene, petit et grand, etc.) to indicate totality completes a schema: male and female were perceived as antonyms, so they often replace tuit with the most frequent formulae.