René d’ Anjou and His Textual Models

Abstract

This essay considers in detail the numerous and diverse ways in which two literary model texts, the Quête du Saint Graal and the Roman de la Rose, function in the Livre du Cœur. René-author uses both the Quête and the Rose as key points of departure, while at the same time, consistently emphasizing the essential differences between them and his own (hybrid) masterwork. René’s text thus appears as a significant continuation of these two French canonical texts: a 15th-century rewriting of the two 13th-century authoritative literary model texts in the vernacular. This status is elaborated by the Livre du Cœur’s references to a key set of 15th-century French authors and texts: Alain Chartier (d. 1430), the Hôpital d’Amour of Achille Coulier (c. 1425-41), and to René himself, who is identified in multiple “biographic” ways that seem to contradict both the courtly and the chivalric ideals embodied in the Cœur. Finally, there is the literarily self-conscious inscription of a set of (tri-lingual) model authors: Ovid, Machaut, Boccaccio, Jean de Meun, Petrarch, and Alain Chartier. René is placing himself at the culmination of this line.