A c. 1470 medieval manuscript of love casuistry and courtly love by French manuscript - 1470

A c. 1470 medieval manuscript of love casuistry and courtly love.

[15th CENTURY MANUSCRIPT] [LOVE] The demandes d'amour and the venditions d'amour. Ms. on vellum, ca. 1470; 210 x 155 mm, 29 leaves .

$62,500

A medieval manuscript of love casuistry and courtly love. Neatly written French manuscript in parchment, French gothic bastarda, numerous initials alternating in red and blue, calfskin leaves set in mauve ink, 19th century vellum binding, large golden fleur-de-lys at the corners and in the center of the plates, blindstamp with gilding, two liturgical fragments of the 12th century used as paste-downs, manuscript title Dits et ventes d'amour, some initials reworked in the 19th century. It is possible the manuscript is a substantial fragment of a longer text, but that requires additional investigation.
Collections of demandes d'amour appeared in the fourteenth century. The demandes d'amour was a courtly game played between man and women with the subject of particularly thorny problems of love with impossible definitive answers. The game evolved from the schoolroom and entered the world of late medieval courts, knights and dames. They consisted of a series of questions and answers dealing with the ideology, etiquette, and allegorical codification of love; presented in the form of a dialogue between a man and a woman. These 'love-problems' where intended to provoke discussion and encourage witty conversation and grew in popularity among the aristocracy especially in France and England between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The older attribution of this manuscript to the love poet Alain Chartier (ca. 1385- 1433) has been refuted by more recent research. The demandes were referenced frequently in literature of that time as one of the most popular kinds of noble entertainment. Christine de Pisan reports on demandes gracieuses at the court of the poet Charles d'Orléans. ARLIMA list only 25 manuscripts, none in America. (https://www.arlima.net/ad/demandes_damours.html) They are often combined with a second text, the venditions d'amour, also a courtly love game. Both texts (demandes & venditions) are usually found together. The latest research knows only 9 manuscripts, seven of them, as here, combined with the demandes. The present manuscript is unknown and therefore a provides the potential to further our understanding of the text's transmission.

This manuscript is an important contribution to this highly important genre of medieval love casuistry. Although there seem to be some gaps in the present manuscript, (although no leaves are torn out), the original text can't be identified with certainty. This is due to the open character of the literary genre. More often than not the entire text was not faithfully copied, but rather individual parts were excerpted, revised and rearranged. Since the text consists of individual questions and answers without a strict structure, text interventions and rearrangements were commonplace. This manuscript also shows clear evidence of the revision of the basic texts, there are over-writings, erasures and possibly additions.

The present manuscript is a direct and unique testimony to noble life and courtly entertainment literature - a monument of late medieval courtly love. Such secular texts are extremely rare in commerce.

Additional photos can be supplied.

References: Les Demandes d'amour. Ed. by MARGARET FELBERG-LEVITT. (Inedita et Rara, 10) Montreal 1997; ARLIMA (https://www.arlima.net/ad/demandes_damours.html); Martijn Rus: D'un lyrisme l'autre. À propos des venditions d'amour, de Christine de Pizan aux recueils anonymes de la fin du Moyen Âge, in: Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes 9 (2002) (online https://journals.openedition.org/crm/80); M. Lazard: Ventes et demandes d'amour, in: Les jeux à la Renaissance, études réunies par Ph. Ariès et J.-Cl. Margolin, Paris 1982, p. 133-149; R. Bergeron: Les venditions françaises
des XIVe et XVe siècles ", in: La langue, le texte, le jeu. Perspectives sur le théâtre médiéval, Actes du colloque international de l'Université Mc.Gill, Montréal, 1986, in: Le Moyen Français 19, 1988, p. 34-57 ; R. Bergeron: Imitations of XVth Century Venditions: Readaptation and Deviation, in: Poetics of Love in the Middle Ages. Texts and Contexts, éd. M. Lazard and N.J. Lacy, Virginia 1989, p. 199-207; Emma Cayley: Debate and Dialogue. Alain Chartier in his Cultural Context, Oxford 2006 (Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs), p. 13f., 39.