The Practice of Debate in French Literature before Machaut

Abstract

Abstract This article considers debates in French literature before Guillaume de Machaut, with some references to Occitan and Latin. It demonstrates that debates were a widespread practice of the period, one which was frequently represented in texts and manuscripts. The first part of the article describes the practice of debate in terms of approaches that debaters can take: an intrinsic approach whereby the terms of the debate dictate the debaters’ strategy, and a contextual approach whereby debaters let their own particulars weigh in on the conversation. It shows how, far from imposing rigid modes of participation, these two complementary approaches gave debaters the opportunity to exploit the debate form for argumentative purposes. The second part discusses two manuscripts to show how the material presentation of texts could bring about debates in literary texts and compilations. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308 presents demandes d’amour as debates through illumination. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 2609 exemplifies how the juxtaposition of texts creates a debate that runs across them. This article contributes to scholarship on debate literature on two different levels: it proposes that we consider the corpus of debate literature in French in terms of practice rather than genre; and it also makes the case for a thriving literary tradition of debate in the twelfth to early fourteenth century, a period often considered only as a prequel to a more robust late medieval tradition.