Debate and Dialogue: Alain Chartier in his Cultural Context (review)

Alain Chartier was among the most prolific of late medieval authors, yet scholarship on his multi-faceted Latin and French writings has not seen the same kind of explosion elicited by the works of his somewhat older contemporary Christine de Pizan. While there have been some informative studies of certain aspects of his works, such as François Rouy's excellent L'Esthétique du traité moral d'après les oeuvres d'Alain Chartier (Geneva, Droz, 1980), no critical study has dealt with all of Chartier's texts. Emma Cayley's book now fills this gap. She offers a comprehensive study that places Chartier's works into the cultural context of the debate. This perspective allows her to deal equally well with Chartier's antecedents, such as scholastic disputations, and with the early humanists' development of a vernacular rhetoric in France. Her inquiry culminates in a detailed analysis of what she terms 'collaborative debating communities', the central term for the innovative aspects of this study, which relies heavily on the terminology and concepts of Pierre Bourdieu and those of game theory. Cayley posits that one of the principal aims of literary debaters was to gain the symbolic capital we all yearn for: prestige. The great merit of Cayley's book is that she reads Chartier's Latin and French works together and against each other, showing that Chartier's 'political, moral, and aesthetic agendas' (p. 89) are as present in the love debates as in his overtly political texts. That much of this 'ethical instruction' (p. 129) takes place in the vernacular is an important development for the late Middle Ages. Cayley's detailed study of the manuscripts will make this book indispensable to Chartier scholars. She shows very well how the anthologizing of texts shapes their meaning and reception. Her analysis of the many waves of debates and literary 'trials' provoked by Chartier's Belle dame sans mercy is both imaginative and grounded in solid manuscript work. Appendix B, charting in thirteen diagram pages the manuscripts containing all of Chartier's texts, is especially useful. By studying these tables the reader can visualize the creation of the 'collaborative fictions' Cayley describes. Given the large number of texts Cayley deals with, total clarity is not always possible. Often Cayley packs so much information into a single page (for example, on conflicts between the monarchy and the papacy, p. 62) that her points get lost in the mass of material. Sometimes less would be more: toward the end of the book the reader gets overwhelmed by the countless texts (all referred to by abbreviations) Cayley describes in manuscript anthologies. Here the narrative loses its way in an otherwise very well conceived book. My major criticism concerns the quality of the illustrations. In a book of this price range we should not be able to see every pixel in an image.