Bédier, Joseph

(zhôzĕf´ bādyā´), 1864–1938, French authority on medieval literature. He was professor at the Collège de France and a member of the French Academy. His reconstruction, in modern French, of the Roman de Tristan et Iseult (1900) brought him fame for its scholarship and beauty. His theory of the origin of the medieval epic, developed in Les Légendes épiques (4 vol., 1908–13), was widely accepted until recent years.