‘La Belle Dame qui eust mercy’ and ‘Le Dialogue d’amoureux et de sa dame’: A Critical Edition and English Translation of Two Anonymous Late-Medieval French Amorous Debate Poems ed. by Joan Grenier-Winther (review)

Joan Grenier-Winther has provided a welcome new bilingual scholarly edition of two important poems (each about four hundred lines) out of around twenty love poems long recognized as ‘the cycle of the Belle Dame sans mercy’. First described as ‘imitations’ by Arthur Piaget in his foundational study ‘La Belle Dame sans merci et ses imitations’ (Romania, 30–34 (1901–05)), these works are more accurately understood as cycle poems as some predate the works of Chartier. In variable sequence and selection, they appear in manuscripts both with and without the Belle Dame (see Alain Chartier: The Quarrel of the Belle Dame sans mercy, ed. and trans. by Joan McRae (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 21). Some of the cycle poems are true sequels showing the recalcitrant Belle Dame on trial, while others, such as these, have independent plot lines reworking the character types and situations of the Chartier poem, most often in dialogue between a man and a woman. As a group, the cycle poems offer a fascinating perspective on the social and collaborative nature of late-medieval literary composition and creation of manuscript anthologies, as well as a woman’s voice speaking up for her right to love or not love as she chooses, if only in fiction. In La Belle Dame qui eust mercy, a lady and gentleman argue the case for accepting his love, with the lady resisting — like Chartier’s heroine — until the final speech of the poem where she abruptly, if somewhat ambiguously, accepts his offer. In Le Dialogue d’amoureux et de sa dame, the lady’s rejection is unwavering throughout. Exceptionally for the Belle Dame cycle, the lady has the last word in both poems (in almost every witness, but see p. 71). This volume presents the second modern edition of La Belle Dame qui eust mercy and the first to incorporate all twenty extant manuscripts, incunabula, and early printed books. The Dialogue, surviving in four manuscripts and several early books, is edited here for the first time. Cast in octosyllables, the two poems are highly unusual in consisting of two parts: eighteen stanzas of a conventional eight or ten lines each, followed by eighteen stanzas of the extraordinary thirteen lines. Grenier-Winther reviews the evidence (strong but not conclusive) that each work consists of two different poems creatively combined as one (pp. xix–xxii) and that the author of ‘Poem 1’ in each case was Oton de Granson (pp. xxiii–xxxi). The base manuscript used for both poems is BnF f. fr. 1131 (Pc), with missing material or mistakes filled in from other witnesses or, rarely, authorial emendation (pp. l–li). Scholarship is served by the excellent Introduction, comprehensive list of variant readings, description of all manuscripts and early books up to 1617, and an extensive bibliography with separate categories for other editions, critical studies, and manuscript studies. The English translation is lucid, flowing, but debatable at times, as in the Dialogue stanzas 29, 30, and 35, where the lady (like Chartier’s Belle Dame, Belle Dame stanza 30) emphatically denies all blame for the gentleman’s self-serving choice to misconstrue her oblivious facial expression as a come-on.