“De l'ombre de mort en clarté de vie”: The Evolution of Alain Chartier's Public Voice

Summary

Alain Chartier's La Belle Dame sans mercy (1424, henceforth: BDSM) has inspired controversy from its stormy first reception, when certain self-styled “loyaulx serviteurs,” writing to the aristocratic ladies of a court of love, claimed that the work attempted to “mectre rumeur en la court amoureuse et rompre la queste des humbles servants” (362, lines 26–27). These irate readers called for the censorship of the poem, urging the ladies to “destourner vos yeulz de lire si desraisonables escriptures et n'y donner foy ne audience” (362, lines 31–32). Far from negating the BDSM's text, such letters incited renewed controversy, generating a wide variety of imitations and responses in several languages, from a group which Emma Cayley has recently characterized as a “collaborative community”: through vigorous debate, and close re-reading of one another's work, the letters' authors affirmed their collective sense of the importance of debate and discussion. Indeed, recent criticism of Chartier's text has emphasized the dialectical nature of the debate, which the poet may well have intended to stimulate by writing a work generating violent reaction. His text formed the center of a dynamic sequence of literary exchanges, which contributed to making him one of the most important French authors of the fifteenth century. While BDSM has elicited much literary criticism, we intend to recommend in this article that the work should also be read as documenting an important phase in the evolution of Chartier's public voice, discernible in both verse and prose, and seen as addressing France's social and political problems in the 1400s.