Introduction to Literary Debate in Late Medieval France

How medieval poems sparked discussions on women’sagency, love, marriage, and honor that prefigured modern feminism 

Thisvolume immerses readers in a debate tradition that flourished in France during thelate Middle Ages, focusing on two works that were both popular andcontroversial in their time: Le Roman de la Rose by thirteenth-centurypoets Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun and La Belle Dame sans Mercy by fifteenth-century royal secretary andpoet Alain Chartier. This is the first comparative volume on these importantworks and the discussions they sparked.  

Engaging with questions of women’s agency, love,marriage, and honor, these two poems prompted responses that circulated via treatises,letters, and sermons among officials, clerics, and poets. Joan McRae provides commentaryon the two texts, a timeline and summary of the resulting debates, and biographicalsketches of the leading intellectuals who matched wits over different ways ofreading the texts, including pioneering writer Christine de Pizan. McRae showsthat these works and the debates, read together, consider a range of socialissues that raise questions of gender, the place of power and hierarchy in societalrelationships, and the responsibility of writers for the effect of their workson readers.

An Introduction toLiterary Debate in Late Medieval France is a helpful overview of these weighty argumentsfor both students and scholars. McRae provides a compact, comprehensive, andup-to-date study, spotlighting influential literary expressions that evolvedinto the “querelle des femmes,” the “woman question,” which in turn paved theway for modern feminism.

A volume in the series New Perspectives on MedievalLiterature: Authors and Traditions, edited by R. Barton Palmer and Tison Pugh