"The Practice of Debate in French Literature before Machaut" and "Bernier de Chartres' 'Vraie Medecine d'amours' and His Lady's Response (Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 2609)"

Author: Staff

Vienna, ÖNB, 2609 34rb lady with cleric and ape (post-prologue of R1)

These two coordinated articles by Johannes Junge Ruhland offer new elements for the study of debate literature in medieval French. "The Practice of Debate" (French Studies 78.1) offers a synthesis and reappraisal of debate literature in French before ca. 1350 and argues for the need to include manuscripts as evidence of the corpus. "Bernier de Chartres' 'Vraie medecine d'amours'" (Romania 141.3-4) makes available for the first time an important but understudied primary source that combines love poetry, debate literature, animal lore and medical imagery. The introduction makes the case for why Bernier's text and the anonymous response should be considered as parts of a larger literary debate staged in a manuscript and provides overlooked codicological data.