In this deceptively small volume, Joan E. McRae has tackled the gargantuan task of introducing readers to the literary debates surrounding two of medieval French literature’s most well-known texts without either over-simplifying matters or drowning the audience in details. She succeeds rather well. Across a brief introduction, six chapters of varying length, and two appendices, which are accompanied by endnotes, a bibliography, and a robust index, McRae presents the literary and political climate of fifteenth-century France, summarizes both the Roman de la Rose and the Belle dame sans Mercy and the debates that sprang up around them, and explains who the major figures in these discussions were and what they themselves contributed.
The Introduction quickly announces who this text is for: “general readers, university students of literature, and those who teach it” (1). It is all the more important, then, that McRae explicitly connects the medieval practices of debate to the modern, and the topics debated--gendered rights, class, and politics among them--to current concerns, laying out the points of cultural continuity and relevance to today’s readers. Although these issues come to the fore later in the book, they are less present in Chapter 1, which offers an overview of Western European debate culture from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. McRae makes a logical, if not always strictly chronological, progression from debate as part of legal and religious scholarly training to Petrarch and the discussions about translatio studii to the poetic disputes of the fifteenth century.
The next two chapters form a small block focused on the Rose and its legacy. Chapter 2 summarizes not only the text itself, but also the circumstances of its composition, the sources on which Jean de Meun drew, and allegory as a literary genre up to the thirteenth century. The last several pages discuss its influence on contemporary and slightly later literature, including Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de vie humaine and the Lamentations of Matheolus. McRae’s remarks on the Rose’s misogyny and her presentation of positive and negative receptions of the text in the form of various rewritings and responses set the stage for Chapter 3, which concentrates specifically on the debate between Christine de Pizan, Gontier Col, and Jean de Montreuil at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Readers are first provided with a timeline of the debate, running from Christine’s 1399Epistre au Dieu d’amour to Jean Gerson’s sermons against the Rose in December 1402 and Christine’s presentations of the debate as a coherent set of documents to multiple patrons between 1403 and 1414. McRae then efficiently summarizes each of the contributions to the debate, making clear the authors’ positions and the ways they responded to each other (language, attitude, involvement of social circles, etc.). For audiences interested in the debate who do not have the French to work directly with the originals, and for whom their convoluted language even in translation poses difficulties, this section will be immeasurably helpful. This chapter is supplemented by Appendix A, which contains biographies of the major contributors to this debate as well as somewhat longer summaries of the various documents comprising it.
The following chapter provides an effective chronological bridge between the two texts at the heart of this book. McRae’s examination of the “cultural climate of chaos” (49) offers a broad-strokes understanding of the internecine struggles for power accompanying King Charles VI’s bouts of madness, but her interest lies equally in the literary goings-on that both responded to and attempted to mask the conflicts. Poetry is, after all, political. With that segue, we are launched into what is by far the longest chapter in the book, which treats both Alain Chartier’s Belle dame sans Mercy and the texts responding to and inspired by it. Readers are almost immediately directed to Appendix B for more extensive summaries of the various poems mentioned, which leads me to wonder why McRae did not opt to divide Chapter 5 into a presentation of the literary contents first, and then analysis in a separate chapter. Further subdivisions would also have been helpful, as when moving from Chartier’s work itself into discussion of the second and third cycles of poems debating the Belle dame sans Mercy. Consideration of these later poems--particularly those in which the Belle Dame is put on trial--and the contemporary legal system makes it clear to readers how extensively literature, even allegorical literature, drew on the realities of daily life.
The final body chapter, “The Two Debates: Exemplum, Morality, Motive, and Method,” makes an argument for considering the two debates to be part of a literary continuum, read and appreciated by the same or similar publics. McRae brings in biographical and manuscript evidence to support the case that readers appreciated Christine’s and Alain’s moral works together but admits that it was unlikely they associated the two debates. She also considers their similarities and differences in execution and form. Here as throughout the book, McRae’s analysis of the social and literary networks surrounding her two foci demonstrates the breadth of knowledge undergirding her work.
That said, there are some issues. First and foremost is that despite the attempts at concision, the text would have benefitted from further editing to trim repetition and catch typos. The choice of endnotes rather than footnotes was perhaps intended to make the text less visually intimidating to the general reader, but of course makes it more difficult to follow the back and forth between text and source smoothly (although, in deference to this format, there are few discursive notes). And finally, the lists of manuscripts in the appendices are so simplified as to be more confusing than helpful. Despite these faults, this book is well adapted to its intended audience, providing a solid overview of literary debate culture in fifteenth-century France as a whole, and will undoubtedly inspire many to read further in the literature treated here, whether in English translation or in the original Middle French.