This essay approaches the topic of distortion from an unashamedly recuperative angle. The epigraph here is that most famously reprised biblical quotation: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known’, from 1 Corinthians 13:12. It is cited out of context in a hundred different songs, television shows, films and poems, including as the title of a 1961 Ingmar Bergman film, which exploits the notion of human misapprehension and the distorted or partial nature of human knowledge, of human works and endeavours in the face of the divine. The perhaps questionable reception of this quotation forms a jumping-off point for our investigation of the reception and/or distortion of medieval texts, from the moment they emerge in written form, to their modern manifestations under foot or digitally translated and transformed.

Within the field of medieval French literature and manuscript studies, the textual and material phenomena of incompleteness, instability and fragmentation – or perhaps what we might rather more positively call continuations, variance and multiplication – have been the subject of a number of studies in recent decades. The discrete text is often left incomplete or unfinished through the common medieval trope of the refusal or deferral of ending or judgement (especially in the dialogued or debate poem), which is projected beyond the diegetic frame of the text through a number of textual devices: an unreliable narrator; an absent judge; a delay to find legal representation; ambiguity, and so on. This might seem unsatisfactory until one realises that a continuation is usually offered, often in the shape of a further text or texts; and indeed that the ‘original’ text gains from its contextual – or as Jean-Claude Mühlethaler puts it, ‘co-textual’ – reading across the linguistic surfaces of a manuscript or printed compilation, or cycle.

In this context, the ‘original’ itself is held up as imperfect, unfinished, continuable; and therefore any ‘distortion’ in the sense of continuation or adaptation may be seen as a positive gain. Indeed, ‘distortion’ itself is a not unproblematic word, since while more often than not used to indicate deviation from a norm or original form in a pejorative sense, it can signify positively in certain contexts.

This essay proposes a consideration of Alain Chartier's oeuvre in the material context of its fifteenth-century reception, through an exploration of the diverse manuscript tradition. The manuscript is conceptualised here as a space of play and Chartier posited as a site of authority and mastery, as well as key player within the codex. I offer a parallel study here of two manuscripts, typical of the two main branches of the transmission of Chartier's Latin and French works respectively: Tours, Bibliothèque municipale (BM), MS 978, and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), fr. 1642. These two mss give us vital insights into the transmission patterns of Chartier's literary production; and into two ostensibly distinct domains of activity: political and diplomatic (the Latin and French prose works); poetic and playful (the French verse). The context of the Tours MS apparently directs us to the official, humanistic and Latinate world of the Paris chancery; while BnF, fr. 1642, appears to refer us to the non-official vernacular world of the ‘cour amoureuse’ and courtly debate poetry. There is, however, more overlap between the two domains of Chartier's production than one might expect, particularly in the subtle interweaving of political and poetic discourses, as I reveal through an examination of the pieces collected in both these manuscripts, in text and paratext.

The Tours MS collects Chartier's anti-curial Latin letter, the De vita curiali, with other Latin epistles circulated between humanist scholars of the Paris chancery in the early fifteenth century, and also with Books XIV and XV of Boccaccio's De genealogia deorum gentilium (1350–74) which present a defence of poetry. Collected within BnF, fr. 1642, alongside Chartier's French works, we find debate poems which problematise gender, deal with the rejection of corrupt courtly mores and discourse, and call for the renewal of poetic language. The anthologisation of these poems with Chartier's texts hints, amongst other things, at a possible ‘profeminine’ prise de position by Chartier in the Querelle des femmes, a recurrent motif in Chartier's oeuvre picked up by the liminal quotation here from his Complainte.

Alain Chartier, known to the sixteenth century as the ‘pere de l'eloquence françoyse’ (and ranked alongside Dante in both English and French works for his contribution to vernacular eloquence), was one of the most provocative, significant and prolific authors of late medieval France, composing both poetry and prose in Latin and French. Chartier's works were celebrated, imitated, translated and transmitted widely throughout Europe during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and set up as models both in manuals of versification such as ‘L'Infortuné's’ Instructif de seconde rhétorique (1480), in the immensely popular manuscript anthology the Jardin de Plaisance, printed by Anthoine Vérard in 1501, Pierre Fabri's Le Grant et Vrai Art de pleine rhétorique (1521), or Thomas Sebillet's Art poëtique françois (1548), and in poetical works of the later period. However, as Laidlaw confirms in the Foreword to our volume, the relatively small number of modern studies on Chartier (compared with later medieval authors such as Christine de Pizan or François Villon), and the frequent emphasis on his prose as the ‘instrument of his greatest works’ (W. B. Kay), has tended to obscure his exemplary contemporary reputation until recent years. While scholars such as Champion, Poirion, Walravens and Hoffman have discussed Chartier's influence as part of their more general study of his writing, this volume aims to focus attention squarely on the question of the legacy and impact of Chartier's oeuvre, including his far-reaching influence on court poetry and debate, norms of eloquence and political thought.

Chartier's selected works appeared in no fewer than twenty-five printed editions from 1489 (Pierre le Caron) to 1617 (Samuel Thiboust), and they were collected in around two hundred fifteenth-century manuscript copies. The European appeal of our ‘clerc excellent, orateur magnifique’ is demonstrated by the number of translations of his works that were circulating in the late fifteenth century. There are fifteenth-century Middle French and English translations of Chartier's Latin works, the De vita curiali and the Dialogus familiaris (including an English translation by William Caxton of 1484). The French prose works were also translated into Castilian (Quadrilogue invectif) and Middle English (Quadrilogue, Livre de l'Esperance).

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:

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.