Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Essays
- The Current State of Research on Late-Medieval Drama: 1998–2000. Survey, Bibliography, and Reviews
- History or Fiction? The Role of Doubt in Antoine de La Sale's Le Paradis de la royne Sibille
- Drawing Conclusions: The Poetics of Closure in Alain Chartier's Verse
- Widows: Their Social and Moral Functions According to Medieval German Literature, with Special Emphasis on Erhart Gross's Witwenbuch (1446)
- Robert Henryson's Pastoral Burlesque Robene and Makyne (c. 1470)
- Late-Medieval Merchants: History, Education, Mentality, and Cultural Significance
- Grandeur et modernité de Philippe de Commynes (1447–1511)
- Who Witnessed and Narrated the 'Banquet of the Pheasant' (1454)? A Codicological Examination of the Account's Five Versions
- Medications Recommended in Incunabula
- English Knights, French Books, and Malory's Narrator
- Quatre figures féminines apocryphes dans certains Mystères de la Passion en France
- Die Bibel in der spätmittelalterlichen religiösen Gebrauchsliteratur
- Conter et juger dans les Arrêts d'Amour de Martial d'Auvergne (c.1460)
- L'Argent: cette nouvelle merveille des merveilles dans la version en prose de la Chanson d'Esclarmonde (1454)
- Magic and Superstition in a Fifteenth-Century Student Notebook
Drawing Conclusions: The Poetics of Closure in Alain Chartier's Verse
from Essays
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Essays
- The Current State of Research on Late-Medieval Drama: 1998–2000. Survey, Bibliography, and Reviews
- History or Fiction? The Role of Doubt in Antoine de La Sale's Le Paradis de la royne Sibille
- Drawing Conclusions: The Poetics of Closure in Alain Chartier's Verse
- Widows: Their Social and Moral Functions According to Medieval German Literature, with Special Emphasis on Erhart Gross's Witwenbuch (1446)
- Robert Henryson's Pastoral Burlesque Robene and Makyne (c. 1470)
- Late-Medieval Merchants: History, Education, Mentality, and Cultural Significance
- Grandeur et modernité de Philippe de Commynes (1447–1511)
- Who Witnessed and Narrated the 'Banquet of the Pheasant' (1454)? A Codicological Examination of the Account's Five Versions
- Medications Recommended in Incunabula
- English Knights, French Books, and Malory's Narrator
- Quatre figures féminines apocryphes dans certains Mystères de la Passion en France
- Die Bibel in der spätmittelalterlichen religiösen Gebrauchsliteratur
- Conter et juger dans les Arrêts d'Amour de Martial d'Auvergne (c.1460)
- L'Argent: cette nouvelle merveille des merveilles dans la version en prose de la Chanson d'Esclarmonde (1454)
- Magic and Superstition in a Fifteenth-Century Student Notebook
Summary
The ballade ascribed to “Perseverance” in Chartier's “Le Breviaire des Nobles” (1416–26), contains a passage which might provide a starting point for a discussion of poetic closure (which has been disputed) in the poet's verse:
Il ne fait rien, qui commence et ne fine;
Et des que aucun a varïer s'encline,
Son bien passé demeure en oublïance.
Et quant l'euvre est haulte, louable et digne,
S'on l'entreprent sans ce qu'on l'enterine,
C'est reprouche de lasche oultrecuidance (vv. 428–33).
Chartier seems, in these lines, to endorse artistic closure, based on the premise that a work, once begun, must at some point be ended by the author.
In this article I intend to examine the concept of artistic closure in Chartier's poetry, arguing that the poet subverts some medieval theories of literary “ending.” What results in his work is a discernible tension between closure and open-endedness, a tension which is characteristic of medieval debate poetry. A certain vocabulary of closure, which Chartier employs, links his poetry to the semantic reservoir of terms expressing closure drawn upon by other poets, among them Christine de Pizan, his literary predecessor. Primarily, I will locate elements of symmetry, continuity, and fracture to be found in Chartier's verse, relating these disparate factors to an “aesthetics of irresolution” which he shared with his contemporaries.
The literary device of bilateral symmetry, whose origins lie in medieval and classical treatises on style, supposes that the poet creates an intimate connection between the beginning and end of a text and hence imposes structure on the literary work, reinforced in fixed form poetry by an arrangement of metrical and rhythmic constraints.
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- Fifteenth-Century Studies , pp. 51 - 64Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2003