Intertextual Play and the Game of Love: The Belle Dame sans mercy Cycle

Summary

In rereading Alain Chartier's La Belle Dame sans mercy (1424) and its epigonous cycle of poetic responses, I was left with questions about rather than answers to various problems. Chartier's work and the series of poems it engendered are rich, complex creations, with regard both to form and subject matter or, as I may phrase it, narratology and doctrine. Grounded in the social and literary conventions of the late Middle Ages, these texts offer a field of inquiry to the literary critic and the historian, yet anyone analyzing these areas must also be versed in the cultural development. Contemporary approaches provide insights into these works, perspectives unavailable to earlier generations of scholars, and this article is one example of how literary criticism and culture studies might focus together on texts from the past. Chartier's poem of one hundred octosyllabic stanzas in the form of a debate between allegorical figures and the text's sequels make up a corpus of occasionally problematic texts that warrant my case study. The poet's work and the cycle tell us about the late Middle Ages, the texts’ medievalness, their modernity, and, above all, problems of courtly love, even of love relationships in general.

Alain Chartier (1385–1430) wrote several works on contemporary history and politics in addition to his poetic oeuvre; his courtly poetry, imitated by fellow writers, constitutes the last phase of a long medieval tradition. La Belle Dame sans mercy, which opposes an amant martyr [martyred lover] to an indifferent woman, as manifested through a metaforensic debate, shows signs of the ultimate disintegration of the courtly love ethos in France. The issues raised by Chartier in this poem came to be discussed in a series of later texts by other writers; with La Belle Dame these responses comprise a cycle of theme-related poetic opinions.

Fin’ amor(s), often translated by the term “courtly love,” formed an essential element in the poetry of the troubadours and in romances by Beroul, Thomas, Chrétien de Troyes, Jean Renart, and others, and influenced love poetry from the twelfth century to the fifteenth. In his classic study The Allegory of Love, Clive Staples Lewis lists the constituent traits of courtly love: humility, courtesy, adultery, and the religion of love.