Summary Journal Literature 1

Grenier , Joan. 2016. Late Medieval French Composite Poems. International Journal of Language and Literature, Vol. 4, No. 1, (pp: 1-12).

Three anonymous French poems from the late Middle Ages present an additional problem in the often frustrating job of assigning of authorship to early texts, to wit, they have a bi-partite structure that would seem to indicate that each poem is, in fact, an amalgamation of two separate works, thus may have been written by two different poets. Piaget’s original and unsubstantiated theory from 1894 that La Belle Dame was really a composite of two separate works is now underpinned with manuscript, material and thematic evidence. Recent studies on poetic production in late medieval France, including Emma Cayley’s (2006) theory of “collaborative debating communities,” Adrien Armstrong’s (2012) “virtuoso circles,” and Jane H. M. Taylor’s (2007) “coterie poetics,” offer new ways to examine and understand their regularities in poetic structure that are found in La
Belle Dame, Le Dialogue, and Le Serviteur. At some point, a second poem on a similar theme, pre- or post-dating the first poem, with a thirteen-line stanzaïc structure and a “happy” ending, was either copied or bound immediately after the first poem to indicate that the two poems.