Debate and Dialogue: Alain Chartier in his Cultural ContextClarendon Press, 2006 M09 28 - 272 pages In early humanist France two debating traditions converge: one literary and vernacular, one intellectual and conducted mainly via Latin epistles. Debate and Dialogue demonstrates how the two fuse in the vernacular verse debates of Alain Chartier, secretary and notary at the court of Charles VI, and later, Charles VII. In spite of considerable contemporary praise for Chartier, his work has remained largely neglected by modern critics. This study shows how Chartier participates in a movement that invests a vernacular poetic with moral and political significance, inspiring such social engagements as the fifteenth-century poetic exchange known as the Querelle de la Belle Dame sans mercy. Emma Cayley sets Chartier in the context of a late-medieval debating climate through the use of a new model of participatory poetics which she terms the collaborative debating community. This is a dynamic and generative social grouping based on Brian Stock's model of the textual community, as well as Pierre Bourdieu's sociological categories of field, habitus, and capital. This dialectical model takes account of the socio-cultural context of literary production, and suggests the fundamentally competitive yet collaborative nature of late-medieval poetry. Cayley draws an analogy here between literary debates and game-playing, engaging with the game theory of Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois, and discusses the manuscript context of such literary debates as the materialization of this poetic game. The collaborative debating community postulated affords unique insights into the dynamics of late-medieval compositional and reading practices. |
Contents
1 | |
The Literary Legal and Intellectual Antecedents of Late Medieval Debate | 12 |
Explorations of a Debating Climate in Early Humanist France | 52 |
Alain Chartier and the Rise of a Vernacular Humanist Rhetoric | 87 |
Collaborative Debating Communities in Late Medieval France | 136 |
Conclusion | 189 |
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Common terms and phrases
Alain Chartier 1974 Arrêts Arsenal BDSM Bibliothèque bien Bourdieu's Caulier's Cent Ballades Champion Chapter Charles VI Chartier's Belle Dame Christine de Pizan Christine's closure collaborative debating community collaborative fictions Coluccio Salutati context contre court Cruelle Femme cycle Dame lealle Dame sans mercy Débat debate poem Demandes d'amour dialogue Droz edition Epistle Erreurs du jugement fait fictional fols français France François Villon French verse Guillaume Guillaume de Machaut intertextual Jean de Meun Jean de Montreuil Jean Gerson Jean Robertet jeu-parti Jugement du povre L'Amant rendu cordelier Laidlaw late medieval Latin Lay de paix literary debate Livre manuscript Martin le Franc Michault Taillevent Migli Moyen narrator Oeuvres Oxford Paris Passe temps Piaget Pierre Chastellain poetic poetry poets povre triste amant prose Quadrilogue invectif Querelle response rhetoric Romania Rose Salic Law Sodalis space of play suggest Taillevent Taillevent's tenso texts textual University Press vernacular vita curiali vols XVe siècle