Q
QUAESTIO
. See SCHOLASTICISM
QUARREL OF THE BELLE DAME SANS
MERCI
. Nothing attests so accurately to the continuing popularity of Alain Chartier’s poem
(1424) as the debate and the imitations it continued to inspire for more than a century. It
is doubtful, however, that it caused as much of a scandal as has sometimes been claimed;
the debate rather suggests a literary game like those that continued to be popular into the
17th century. At the court of the dauphin Charles (the future Charles VII), where the
poem was written, some courtiers and ladies reproached Chartier for the attitude toward
women reflected in the poem. He replied with his Excusacion aux dames, in which the
God of Love defends the ladies, accusing the poet of heresy. Neither this nor the ladies’
complaints can be taken too seriously.
Chartier’s Excusacion, ca. 1430, inspired an exchange of poems by members of a
literary group in Tournai, the most important of which were Baudet Herenc’s Parlement
d’Amour, the anonymous Dame loyale en amours, Achille Caulier’s Cruelle femme en
amours, and the Hôpital d’amour. The latter, preserved in twenty-one manuscripts and
inspired in large part by the Roman de la Rose, was long attributed to Chartier himself.
Other poems in the same vein debating the merits of the lover or the lady, or presenting a
trial of the lovers, usually in Love’s court, are the anonymous Belle dame qui eut merci,
the Jugement du povre triste amant banni, and the Amant rendu cordelier. The suits of
the rejected lover in the God of Love’s court would lead eventually to Martial
d’Auvergne’s Arrêts d’Amour (1450), in which the lover’s debates of the earlier poems
have been transformed into court trials.
Chartier’s poem was copied (thirty-four known manuscripts), refuted, approved, and
imitated with varying degrees of talent. It was translated into Italian, English, and Catalan
and was turned into a series of rondeaux by Anne de Graville in the 16th century, when
the debate was also mentioned in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron.
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1456