Le Cycle de ‘La Belle Dame sans Mercy’
2005; Oxford University Press; Volume: 59; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/fs/kni147
ISSN1468-2931
Autores ResumoAlain Chartier, Baudet Herenc, Achille Caulier: Édition bilingue établie, traduite, présentée et annotée par David F. Hult et Joan E. McRae. (Champion Classiques, Moyen Âge, 8). Paris, Champion, 2003. lxxxi+611 pp. Pb €17.00. Alain Chartier's Belle Dame sans Mercy was widely read in late-medieval France; however, as the editors of this much-needed volume observe, it was normally read as part of a cycle of poems which rapidly accrued around it. To reproduce this reading experience, Hult and McRae edit Chartier's poem alongside the texts with which it forms a coherent sequence in a single manuscript, BnF ms. fr. 1131: these include not only the pieces constituting what scholars generally term the querelle de la ‘Belle Dame’, but also Chartier's own Complainte and Débat de Réveille Matin, and Achille Caulier's Hôpital d'Amour. The editors' selection not only conveys the realities of fifteenth-century poetic transmission; it also highlights the significant thematic and narrative affinities between the Belle Dame and its continuations on the one hand, and the more loosely related poems on the other. The final continuation, the Erreurs du Jugement, is absent from the base manuscript. Accordingly, it is supplied only in the form of key extracts, in a dossier of complementary materials; an appropriate fate, in view of its lack of popularity with contemporary audiences. Similarly, the editors supply only the most significant variants from a limited number of witnesses: they seek to provide a snapshot of the poems' reception, not a fully critical edition of each text. Yet they are no bédieriste fundamentalists: various readings from BnF fr. 1131 are rejected in favour of those from other key witnesses, particularly in the case of Baudet Herenc's Accusation contre la Belle Dame sans Mercy, previously known to scholars as the Parlement d'Amour (a title much less in keeping with the manuscript tradition). The accompanying translations into modern French, while as practical and literal as one might expect of such reading aids, are reliable and sensitive: only one rendering, ‘m'amène ici’ for ‘me maine’ (p. 92, v. 5), occasions significant doubts (why not ‘me tourmente’?). A glossary of well-judged scope complements the translation effectively, while the index of proper names includes personifications. Notes on the texts' literary aspects are sparing, and focus primarily on stylistic issues or intertextual allusions. The substantial introduction begins by outlining the transmission and reception of Chartier's work, and suggesting that the Belle Dame was composed more or less simultaneously with the Complainte: the claim is perhaps questionable, resting as it does upon thematic and narrative parallels alone, but this is certainly the reading encouraged by many manuscript anthologies. The Belle Dame itself is persuasively read against Chartier's more explicitly didactic output: the lady, far from being simply adversarial, recommends self-love and self-respect to her suitor, who in turn comes to exemplify chivalric incompetence. The continuations distort the original poem's moral stance in various ways: their authors, distanced from the political and ethical realities surrounding the royal court, adopt a more ludic approach, focusing on the Belle Dame's guilt in the familiar terms of misogynistic satire. This astute analysis completes an admirably reliable and useful volume, which should ensure that the poems at last receive the attention they deserve.
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