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_full_alt_author_running_head (neem stramien B2 voor dit chapter en nul 0 in hierna): 0 _full_alt_articletitle_running_head (oude _articletitle_deel, vul hierna in): The Northern Jeu-parti _full_article_language: en indien anders: engelse articletitle: 0 The Northern Jeu-parti 153 Chapter 6 The Northern Jeu-parti Daniel E. O’Sullivan Medieval audiences loved a good debate. Debate was fundamental, in fact, in medieval society, for scholastic disputationes, formalized debates based on tra- ditional written authoritative sources in order to uncover truths of theology and science, formed the base of medieval higher education. This is not to say that debate was confined to exclusive or Latinate milieux: debate in vernacular literature abounded: from debates among the fictive characters of Chrétien de Troyes to Old Occitan tensos to the thirteenth-century Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale, the medieval public reveled in witty repartee be- tween two or more participants, be the topic serious or comic, sacred or pro- fane. Adam de la Halle was a prominent participant in the production and, presumably, performance of a particular genre of debate songs: the jeux-partis. While the genre did not originate in Arras, it was among the bourgeois, clerical poets of Arras that these lyric debates peaked in popularity. 1 Rules of the Game The jeu-parti was sung and, in terms of meter and melody, shared important characteristics with Old French courtly love songs: poems are composed of rhyming stanzas that retain the same metric and rhyme schemes throughout; the same melody is sung to each stanza (though surely some improvisation occurred in the performance of the songs); one or more envois – shortened stanzas reprising the last few verses of the stanzaic scheme, and thus, presum- ably the corresponding melody – finish off the song. The genre’s themes are also derived from the courtly love song inevitably, though again exceptions are plentiful, the debate centers on some point of love casuistry: the relative mer- its of a woman’s external beauty and her character; the conditions under which a suitor should persevere or give up a suit; the choice between making love to one’s beloved without seeing her or seeing her every day and talking with her; and myriad other possible topics for discussion. Combining form and theme, one can discern the basic outline of the jeu-parti: in the first stanza, one par- ticipant puts an either/or question to his or her collaborator; in stanza two, the collaborator chooses one side and leaves the other to the initiator to defend; © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004379480_008 154 O’sullivan after six stanzas, judges are named by each participant in the envois. Judg- ments may have been rendered, but they were, to the best of our knowledge, never recorded. While the majority of grant chants comprise five to six stanzas with one or two envois, there is no formal necessity for such a structure. For the jeu-parti, there is some logic behind the dominance of the six-stanza structure with two envois. An even number of full stanzas is desirable because it gives each par- ticipant in a two-person jeu-parti the same opportunities to speak. Similarly, the inclusion of two envois lets each participant name his or her own judge. Exceptions to this general trend exist, of course, including Adam de la Halle’s marathon twenty-stanza debate with Jehan Bretel (RS 1675).1 Långfors, Jeanroy, and Brandin suggest poets veered from the typical form to bring out a bit of variety.2 By the same token, the usual number of participants is two, but songs with more participants are attested, and undoubtedly this too was done to ex- periment with variation.3 As Michelle Stewart has shown, the stanzaic and melodic properties of the grant chant and jeu-parti are essentially the same. Indeed, countless critics have pointed out that while the troubadours delighted in formal experimenta- tion, the trouvères seemed to have come to some tacit acceptance on the for- mal parameters appropriate to the Old French love song. Verse and stanza length retain a fair degree of variation – Långfors, Jeanroy, and Brandin iden- tify 167 different rhyme and metrical schemes among the 182 songs they edit – but most stanzas come in around eight verses and the average length of 1 Interestingly, Långfors, Jeanroy, and Brandin omit this song from their Recueil général des jeux-partis français, 2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1926) (hereafter LJB). Out of the 182 poems in their anthology, only five are comprised of more than six stanzas. Six-stanza songs with two envois are most numerous (87), followed by thirteen songs with six stanzas with one envoi and forty-three six-stanza songs with no envois. Only thirty-four songs are comprised of fewer than six stanzas. I take all references to jeux-partis from LJB, with the exception of those by Adam de la Halle, which I take from Adam de la Halle. œuvres complètes, ed. and trans. Pierre-Yves Badel (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1995). Trouvère songs are conventionally identified by their Raynaud-Spanke (hereafter RS) number from Hans Spanke, G. Raynauds Bibliographie des Altfranzösischen Liedes (Leiden: Brill, 1955). For jeux-partis, I include a Roman numeral after the RS number corresponding to the song’s place in LJB. All translations are mine. 2 LJB, vi. 3 In “Cuvelier et vous, Ferri” (RS 1042), Jehan Bretel addresses Cuvelier, Lambert Ferri, and Jehan de Grieviler who respond together. Bretel and Ferri combine forces to debate both the Trésorier d’Aire and Cuvelier in “Biau sire Tresorier d’Aire” (RS 155). The most complicated situation arises in “Concilliés moi, je vos pri, / Rolant” (RS 1078): Burnekin addresses Rolant de Reims and Jehan de Baion together in stanza 1; Rolant answers in stanza 2 and Jehan de Baion does the same in stanza 3. The remaining stanzas are exchanged only between Jehan and Rolant. .

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