‘La Belle Dame qui eust mercy’ and ‘Le Dialogue d’amoureux et de sa dame’: A Critical Edition and English Translation of Two Anonymous Late-Medieval French Amorous Debate Poems ed. and tr. by Joan Grenier-Winther

Abstract

 Reviews (especially France’s government), and into her recommendations for a well-run society . e Cité itself is an engaged and erudite rebuke both to the historical method Christine knew and to the specific historical narratives of her time, which both justified and structured the assumptions, institutions, and political practices of the generations for whom they were written. Some recent studies by French researchers could have lent additional support to Bourgault and Kingston’s thesis. ese include Françoise Autrand, Christine de Pizan : une femme en politique (Paris: Fayard, ); Claire Le Ninan, Le Sage Roi et la clergesse: l’écriture du politique dans l’œuvre de Christine de Pizan (Paris: Champion, ); and Anne Paupert, ‘“Te donrai preuve par exemples”: statut et fonction des exemples dans Le Livre de la Cité des Dames de Christine de Pizan’, Elseneur,  (), –. Works by Christine translated or mentioned in this volume are unfortunately given by their English titles only; the Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc is a curious exception but one misses any reference to the authoritative edition and translation of the poem by Angus J. Kennedy and Kenneth Varty (Medium Ævum Monographs,   (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, )). is City is the third expert English translation of the work published in the last four decades. Hardy comments very briefly on how her translation differs from earlier ones by Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea, , ) and Rosalind Brown-Grant (London: Penguin, ), but some indication from the editors about the need for a new translation would have been helpful. Bourgault and Kingston correctly note that medieval writers, including Christine, depended on patronage; it should be noted, however, that men, by virtue of the formal education they could obtain (as women could not), generally enjoyed clerical or other appointments that gave them a living. As a woman, Christine was doubly victimized: shut out from the steady income an educated man might expect, then le without financial support when her husband died, she herself was evidence of the structural negligence and disdain of women she wrote about. As such, she depended far more than others on commissions and other individual acts of patronage, and her success in the teeth of such demands is all the more remarkable. F U T F ‘La Belle Dame qui eust mercy’ and ‘Le Dialogue d’amoureux et de sa dame’: A Critical Edition and English Translation of Two Anonymous Late-Medieval French Amorous Debate Poems. Ed. and trans. by J G-W. (Critical Texts, ) Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association. . lxxi+  pp. £.. ISBN ––––. is new edition and translation of two of the poems that participate in the Quarrel of the Belle dame sans mercy is particularly interesting because of its coupling of two poems unique in their structure. Joan Grenier-Winther does an exhaustive job of examining the narrative, structure , and provenance of the two poems. She catalogues the twenty extant copies of MLR, .,   La Belle dame qui eust mercy and the four copies of Le Dialogue d’un amoureux et de sa dame and considers the early printed copies as well. e narrative of each poem is summarized and assessed within the context of the competitive and collaborative poetic communities (to borrow phrases from Emma Cayley and Adrian Armstrong) prevalent in mid to late fieenth-century France. Poetic structure is analysed with a focus on the details of versification; language, stylistics, and rhetorical elements are also examined. Grenier-Winther gives particular attention to the poems’ curious stanzaic form: eighteen stanzas of eight (La Belle Dame qui eust mercy) or ten (Le Dialogue d’amoureux et de sa dame) lines followed by eighteen of thirteen lines. ese poetic technicalities are meticulously considered for good reason. GrenierWinther uses her results to consider who might have composed the two poems. She concludes ultimately that Oton de Grandson was the author (p. xxiii), as had Arthur Piaget in a study published in Romania,  (before he seemingly retracted it later). If this attribution is correct, it means that the poems, or at least the first part of each, were written before Chartier’s Belle dame sans mercy, in contrast to the common assumption that they were written...