century, most tellingly displayed in Alain Chartier’s oblique condemnation of
unrewarded love service in La belle dame sans merci and the extended debate to which it
gave rise? Unless one sees love rhetoric itself as a form of poetic imprisonment, how to
detect the transgressive satire of François Villon’s bitter legacy to his apparently
unfaithful “Love,” his “dear rose”—neither his heart nor his liver, but a”large silk purse,”
figure of another part of the poet’s anatomy?
David F.Hult
[See also: ANDREAS CAPELLANUS; ARABIC INFLUENCE ON LITERATURE;
CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES; DROUART LA VACHE]
Boase, Roger. The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love: A Critical Study of European Scholarship.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977.
Burns, E.Jane, and Roberta L.Krueger, eds. “Courtly Ideology and Woman’s Place in Medieval
French Literature.” Special Issue of Romance Notes 25. (Spring 1985).
Duby, Georges. “Dans la France du nord-ouest, au XIIe siècle: les jeunes dans la société
aristocratique.” Annales: Economies—Sociétés—Civilisations 19(1964):835–46.
Frappier, Jean. Amour courtois et table ronde. Geneva: Droz, 1973.
Köhler, Erich. “Observations historiques et sociologiques sur la poésie des troubadours.” Cahiers
de civilisation médiévale 7 (1964):27–51.
Lewis, C.S. The Allegory of Love. Oxford: Clarendon, 1936.
Newman, Francis X., ed. The Meaning of Courtly Love. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1968. [Articles by D.W. Robertson, Jr., C.Singleton, W.T.H.Jackson, J.F.Benton, and
T.Silverstein.]
Paris, Gaston. “Études sur les romans de la table ronde: Lancelot du Lac.” Romania 10(1881):465–
96; 12(1883):459–534.
COURTOIS D’ARRAS
. The earliest and most original dramatization of the parable of the prodigal son (Luke
15:11–32), Courtois d’Arras was composed in Arras by an unknown author in the first
quarter of the 13th century. There are no stage directions in the 664-line play, though six
narrative verses introduce the central episode of Courtois’s riotous living in the tavern,
where he is tricked and robbed by two prostitutes and the innkeeper. The realism and
humor of this scene, reminiscent of other 13th-century Arras plays by Jehan Bodel and
Adam de la Halle, form a dramatic and metrical contrast to the subsequent lamentations
of the destitute youth. Prodded by hunger, Courtois sincerely repents his folly and,
recognizing his sin of pride, returns humbly to his father.
The biblical “famine in the land” is replaced in this play by the hero’s own ravenous
hunger. The inedible piece of bread given him by his new master and the dry, inedible
peapods that the swine are trampling are an expressive contrast with the pain et pois
(“bread and peas”) he had rejected in his father’s house. The opening and closing
dialogues between the father and the unsympathetically portrayed elder brother frame the
threefold central action of worldliness, repentance, and reconciliation, a pattern followed
by many later miracle and morality plays. The pattern is symbolized here by Courtois’s
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 512