Alain Chartier

by Joan E McRae

"Alain Chartier was one of the most popular authors of the fifteenth century; some 200 manuscripts transmit the fruit of his literary genius. After the Renaissance, however, his works received little critical attention until the nineteenth-century poet John Keats and pre-Raphaelite artists revived the image of Chartier's most compelling and enigmatic character in a poem of the same name: "La Belle dame sans merci." In this facing-page edition with English translation, speakers of English, for the first time, will have access to the source of this icon of the femme fatale, a debate between lady and lover in which the pleas and arguments of the lover are turned against him in witty repartee. Ultimately, the lady's unyielding refusal provokes the lover's death of heartache. Following the poem are the letters and erotico-juridical poems inspired by the scandal of this lady whose language was lethal to the lover and the courtly traditions he maintained. In an allegorical courtroom before th