Sans merci:: Affect, Resistance, and Sociality in Courtly Lyric

In medieval love lyric, the specter of the Cruel Lady looms large. Her refusal of a forlorn lover provokes male complaint and merits its own idiom of resistance: in The Romance of the Rose, for instance, hostile figures such as Dangier (Rebuff) impede the Lover, representing either external threats or internal misgivings. According to the conventions of fin'amors, a male lover seeks to win the affection of a distant lady. After a long period of faithful service, the courtly lady takes pity on the devoted lover and bestows her favor upon him, rewarding his suffering. By elevating female pity to an ennobling force, these conventions reinforce the discursive centrality of the male desiring subject. Such bodily performances of male lovesickness and female pity are fundamentally coercive, even as they dramatize the gendered reversals of power inherent in fin'amors.¹

This essay considers what happens when that script is disrupted—when the lady's pity is not assured, when the crisis of asymmetrical desire reveals the relations between will and desire, or the gendering of pité and power. Such transgressive possibilities of denied consent animate Alain Chartier's La Belle Dame sans mercy and the fifteenth-century literary debate it inspired.² Reading Chartier's poem alongside the many responses that interpreted, critiqued, and qualified the poem—and that often appeared with it in the same manuscript—helps us locate female consent (or non-consent) as a site of debate within late medieval courtly poetry.³ Chartier's Belle Dame asserts her independent will and bodily sovereignty, and she rejects the potentially coercive claims of social practice, such as courtesy, which may be leveraged against women to pressure them to accept unwanted advances or violation. Her responses to the Lover's pleas have persuasive force—enough for later writers to take up her case on parchment or to condemn her—and for the whole cycle to be transmitted in manuscript in various arrangements, and later printed. Two fifteenth-century responses to the poem, the anonymous Dame loyale en amour and Achille Caulier's Hôpital d'amour, reflect divergent readings of the poem's protagonist, the first by upholding the lady's honor and making her refusal legible—and less transgressive—within the conventions of fin'amors, and the second by condemning her refusal as felony and fantasizing about her execution. These two responses—to justify and exculpate the lady, or to condemn and destroy her—demonstrate the exegetical range of fifteenth-century readers who reshaped the poem's meaning through their own interventions.

The Belle Dame sans mercy occupied a prominent place in fifteenth-century literary culture, inspiring dozens of works and focalizing the lady's consent within erotic lyric. It participates in the traditions of judgment poetry and love casuistry, and owes much to earlier dits, jugements d'amour, and romances, as well as to the debate poetry of Guillaume de Machaut. Critiques of the Belle Dame as a literary character are localized to the courtly environment of fin'amors; the poem's ambivalent treatment of consent is strikingly juxtaposed with other discourses and institutional cultures, including the late medieval emphasis on consensual, affectionate relations in marriage.⁴ Considered within a local context—the literary ethos of an intertextual, referential network of court poets—and a particular querelle surrounding the ethics and obligations of fin'amors, the Belle Dame elucidates the ways in which female consent is contingently situated within specific bodies of knowledge and linguistic spaces. Even within these intimate "emotional scripts" and lyric subjectivities, female consent is always socially constructed and open to scrutiny.⁵ The Belle Dame's resistance poses larger questions about the uneasy proximity of lyric and rape culture, as well as human agency and free will.⁶ Moreover, Chartier develops an emotional language, assembled from allegory and lyric, that informs both his courtly poetry and his political writings, including Le quadrilogue invectif and Le livre de l'esperance. The profound censure that the Belle Dame/Cruelle Femme faces for her supposed lack of mercy, pity, and compassion might productively be read as...