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COPYRIGHT 2002 Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature
Within the community formed by the forty manuscripts which collect the numerous sequels and imitations of Alain Chartier's controversial poem La Belle Dame sans mercy of 1424 are contained a number of other texts that have close semantic and conceptual links with the Belle Dame sans mercy cycle. (1) Recent interest in the literary debate known as the Querelle de la belle dame sans mercy has resulted in a series of important contributions from Adrian Armstrong, David Hult, Joan McRae, and Helen Solterer, among others. (2) Before suggesting a new reading of the Querelle in its manuscript context, I shall briefly trace the narrative thread that runs through Chartier's Belle Dame sans mercy and the three cycles of sequels and imitations that comprise the Querelle.
Chartier's Belle Dame sans mercy presents the debate between a Belle Dame and her suitor, overheard by the narrator-poet, in which the suitor woos his lady in vain, while she rejects him throughout in no uncertain terms. This poem provoked a long series of literary responses and imitations, starting with letters of outrage, allegedly written by ladies and men of the court, to which Chattier wrote an apology, the Excusacion aux dames. This was followed by the bitter Response des dames in which the ladies of the court refuse to pardon Chattier for his alleged defamation of women through the heartless Belle Dame. A second cycle of works then joined the growing Querelle, consisting of fictional, poetic responses to Chartier's original in which the Belle Dame is tried before a series of courts of law. This second cycle presents the sequels proper; the third cycle of works I refer to as imitations (Piaget's term) as they no longer concern Chartier's original characters.
The Belle Dame is alternately accused (in Baudet Herenc's Parlement d'amours), pardoned (in La Dame lealle en amours), and finally sentenced to death (in Achille Caulier's Cruelle Femme en amours). A further poem, Les Erreurs du jugement de la belle dame sans mercy, presents a posthumous appeal on the part of the Belle Dame's relatives, who insist unsuccessfully that her trial has been misconducted. A third cycle of works concerns the fate of a povre amant figure who is rejected by his lady, and loses his case against her in court in Le Jugement du povre triste amant banny; his relatives later win an appeal against this verdict in Les Erreurs du jugement du povre triste amant banny. There is a further poem, inspired by Les Erreurs, in which a povre amant seeks refuge in the Church, L'Amant rendu cordelier a l'observance d'amours, and a final Confession et testament de l'amant trespasse de deuil. In addition, there were numerous debate texts written in imitation of Chartier's Belle Dame sans mercy, and texts which renewed the theme of love trials in various contexts, from Martin Le Franc's Champion des dames to Martial d'Auvergne's Arrets d'amour.
In this paper I propose a reading of the Querelle de la belle dame sans mercy in manuscript context, focusing on the individual manuscript as a space of play in which texts, and poets behind the texts, dialogue and compete with one another. I shall discuss patterns of collation both within and across manuscript collections, following common threads of invention through the Querelle manuscripts, and applying theoretical models drawn from game theory and sociology in order to trace more clearly the coherent planning of certain Querelle manuscripts. Initially I shall propose a reading of the Paris manuscript BnF, MS f. fr. 1169 (3) which seeks to trace a larger pattern of collaboration through groups of texts collected in the Belle Dame sans mercy manuscripts, turning later to look at two sizeable miscellanies: Paris, Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal, MS 3521 and Arsenal, MS 3523. Such patterning at the level of the manuscript collection will in turn provide a paradigm of collaborative poetic practice in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in France.
I shall follow common threads through the four texts collected in BnF, MS f. fr. 1169, namely Le Jeu des eschaz moralise in a mid-fourteenth-century vernacular translation of Jacobus de Cessolis's Latin treatise by Jehan de Vignay; (4) the two Belle Dame sequels La Dame lealle en amours (5) and Achille Caulier's La Cruelle Femme en amours; (6) and Michault Taillevent's Le Debat du cuer et de l'oeil. (7) I shall show how the relational patterns thus drawn between the texts of this manuscript may provide a useful model for investigation both of other Belle Dame sans mercy manuscripts, and of the collaborative community of poets whose texts occupy the spaces of play and competition instituted within and across manuscript compilations. Pairings of corresponding poems throughout the Querelle body will be highlighted, as the embodiment of the dialectical and agonistic movement of the debate.
Roger Caillois's theories on the classification of games, from his Les Jeux et les hommes, provide useful boundaries for discussion of the poetic game at work in the Querelle, in conjunction with Pierre Bourdieu's categories of social organization, demonstrated by what he terms habitus, field, and capital. In their introduction to a recent special issue of Forum for Modern Language Studies, Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay explore the work of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and discuss the relevance of his theory of practice for medieval studies, focusing on his rejection of a structuralist hermeneutics in favour of a dialectical methodology expressed through the notions of habitus and symbolic capital. (8) Bourdieu's notion of habitus refers to the intimate relationship of products and the socio-historical practices whereby they are produced. In textual terms, this relationship may be seen as that between the text and its mode of transmission, here the physical manuscript. (9) I propose to apply Bourdieu's theory of practice to the practice of the Querelle poets and their texts, situating the individual text/poet in the context of a dialectical struggle with others to gain symbolic capital, thus revealing a field of collaborative relations operating across manuscript collections. The manuscript as space of play, the poet as player, and the text as move within the game will further provide a set of guiding metaphors for the Querelle. The chessboard, an image located in several of the texts collected in the Querelle manuscripts, materializes this notion of a space of play, within whose confines the players are guided both by the rules of the game, and by the pattern of previous moves. The metaphor of chess will help to illustrate and clarify both the individual patterning of Querelle manuscripts and the dialogic play staged across their boundaries.
Jacobus de Cessolis's chess treatise presents a portrait of an ideal hierarchy of contemporary society projected through the confines and rules of the game of chess. The socio-cultural competition between individuals implied by this medieval political metaphor is addressed in Pierre Bourdieu's Logic of Practice, through his notion of societies as fields of play within which players struggle competitively (but in collusion with one another) to acquire forms of symbolic capital. This symbolic capital refers to the honour or prestige `derived from certain practices that may be translated into high status or into material gain, or both'....
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