Laughter and Manhood in the Petit Jehan de Saintré (1456)

Summary

Perhaps due to Julia Kristeva's thesis on Jehan de Saintré published in 1970, or maybe thanks to Erich Auerbach's mention of the work in his monumental Mimesis, studies on Jehan de Saintré are numerous, wide-ranging, and highly charged. The considerable criticism on this text written by Antoine de la Sale (between 1451 and 1456, and extant in ten manuscripts) marks the novel as a compelling and fascinating work positioned between two eras. Just as the text gravitates between two cultures often seen as distinct, the medieval and the early modern, so its eponymous hero moves between childhood and adulthood, changing from “petit Jehan” to Jehan. Much of the critical controversy over this tale is aimed at the central female character, Madame des Belles Cousines, who undertakes a mission to make petit Jehan into the perfect chivalric knight, who would love her in courtly fashion, but she then betrays him by taking another lover. Criticized for making the text “disjoint,” Madame des Belles Cousines and her enigmatic behavior must surely be one of the enduring attractions of this novel; however, by examining the motif of laughter in Saintré, we may better understand the role of Madame, and, by extension, the position of women in fifteenth-c. French society. At the same time, we discover that young Jehan's passage to manhood takes place, syncopated by Madame's laughter.

Laughter, one of the salient features of Jehan de Saintré, plays into the text's development of Jehan from his infancy to his maturity (at the heart of the text), and several studies have examined how laughter precipitates the social change of its characters from medieval to modern. Mirth plays a central role in this work but constitutes a rather unusual sort of laughter, one akin to the fabliaux and Rabelais, and yet having a character all its own. In fact, laughter is here instigated by women, particularly by two types of women — those in the text itself and in presumed female readers or listeners.

In Poirion's “rire qui se prolonge aujourd’hui en délire historique,” the widowed Madame des Belles Cousines mocks the thirteen-year old Jehan de Saintré, a page at the royal court because of his “éminentes qualités” (Dubuis, Saintré, 52).