1. This conception of harm ( laesio ) inflicted by words was divided into two subcategories: slander, the unjust revelation of a hidden charge ( detractio est revelatio injusta criminis occulti ) and calumny, the revelation of a false accusation ( calumnia est revelatio criminis falsi ). For a résumé of these medieval canon legal formulations, see Dictionnaire de droit canonique , 7 vols., ed. R. Naz (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1949), s.v. diffamation , and Helmholz, Select Cases on Defamation to 1600 , xvi-xxvi.

2. Corpus iuris civilis: Codex Iustinianus , book 9, xxxvi; 2:387. The translation that follows is taken from The Civil Law , 15:61-62.

3. Justinian's article appears verbatim in Gratian's Decretum , C. 5, q. 1, c. 3; Corpus iuris canonici , 1:545. The rubrics for the causae read: "He who neglects to pronounce good on the reputation of another in writing shall be beaten" ([F]lagelletur qui scripta in alterius famam probate neglexerit) and "Those who place defamatory material in a church shall be anathematized" (Anathematizentur qui famosos libellos in ecclesia ponunt).

4. For Chartier's texts, as well as the first letters in the Querelle, see The Poetical Works of Alain Chattier , ed. James C. Laidlaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 328-78. References are to this edition; all translations are mine.

5. See Piaget, " La Belle Dame sans merci et ses imitations," Romania 30 (1901): 28-35.

6. Piaget's reaction is paradigmatic: "Faut-il prendre au sérieux cette querelle ridicule? Les courtisanes ont-elles réellement monté une cabale contre le secréaire du roi?" " La Belle Dame sans merci et ses imitations," 35.

7. Pierre Champion inaugurated this critical tack by naming the three Belle Dame respondents as Jeanne Louvet (Mme de Bothéon), Marie Louvet (Mme de Vaubonnais) and Catherine de l'Isle-Bouchard; see his Histoire poétique du quinzième siècle , 2 vols. (Paris: H. Champion, 1923), 1: 71.

8. One telling example involves the account of several damoiselles attending Isabeau of Bavaria who were imprisoned for slander. See Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys contenant le règne de Charles VI, de 1380 à 1422 , 6 vols., ed. and trans. Louis François Bellaguet and Amable-Guillaume-Prosper Brugière, baron de Barante, (Paris: Crapelet, 1839-52), 3:268-73. For another contemporaneous version of this exemplum, see Michel Félibien and D. Guy-Alexis Lobineau, Histoire de la ville de Paris , 5 vols. (Paris: G. Desprez & J. Desessartz, 1725), 2: 765.

9. Yann Grandeau outlines this exemplum as it is propounded by Jacques Legrand and Jean Juvenal des Ursins, "De Quelques Dames qui ont servi la reine Isabeau de Bavière," Bulletin philologique et historique (jusqu'à 1610) du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques (1975): 159-62. It is this exemplum that Christine de Pizan seeks to overturn with her recommendations to women at court concerning the dangers of mesdire : "So with this it is said similarly that women at court should be on their guard not to blame or defame one another because of the sin and other causes that can result from it. Further, whosoever defames another deserves to be defamed himself" (Avec ce, les femmes de court se doivent garder, semblablement que dit est, de ne blasmer ne diffamer l'une l'autre, tant pour le pechié et aultres causes ja assignees comme aussi que qui diffame autre, dessert que lui meismes soit diffaméz. Le Livre des trois vertus , ed. Charity Cannon Willard with Eric Hicks (Paris: H. Champion, 1989), 146.

10. I take exception with Leonard W. Johnson's view that it involves "a literary game not to be taken too seriously, except in a literary context." Poets as Players: Theme and Variation in Late Medieval French Poetry (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 143-44.

11. Poèmes d'Alain Chartier , ed. James Laidlaw (Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1987), 25.

12. From the Justinian Code to Gratian, through most every medieval legal commentator, defamation falls under the heading de iniuriis; see Corpus iuris civilis , book 9, xxv-xxxvi, and Corpus iuris canonici C. v, q. 1, c. 1-3.

13. As William W. Kibler remarks, this separatedness has been the interpretative key, taken by some critics in the past as the sign of her bourgeois identity and by others as the sign of her modernity: ''The Narrator as Key to Alain Chartier's La Belle Dame sans mercy," The French Review 52, no. 5 (April 1979): 716.

14. We should be careful to note the semantic evolution of the term franchise . In much love literature of the high Middle Ages it signifies the courtly virtue of nobility of spirit, as in the Roman de la rose (line 942). But by the later Middle Ages it increasingly means liberty or independence. In this sense, franchise can be specifically linked to the damoiselles d'honneur with whom the respondents are associated. At the time of the Querelle de la Belle Dame they were seeking franchise as employees of the court; Charles VI had issued decrees in 1411-12 offering to "the officers, servants, and relations, noble and non noble, all the liberties, exemptions, and freedom [ franchise ] which ours enjoy and employ" (les officiers, serviteurs, et familiers nobles et non nobles toutes les libertez, exempcions et franchise dont les nostres joïssent et usent). On this point, see Yann Grandeau, "De Quelques Dames," 145.

15. Only two years earlier, ca. 1421-22, Chattier depicted la France in this manner: "a lady who maintains her dignified bearing and nobility that signified her excellent pedigree. But she was in such suffering and so disconsolate that she seemed like a lady fallen from a state of high honor, given what her condition showed. And in her appearance she was severely distressed and troubled by a great misfortune and pain to come" (une dame dont le hault port et seigneury maintien signifioit sa tresexcellente extraction, mais rant rut dolente et esplouree que bien sembloit dame decheue de plus haut honneur que pour lots son estat ne demonstroit. Et bien apparissoit a son semblant que forment feust espoventee et doubteuse de plus grant maleurté et douleur advenir). Alain Chattier, Le Quadrilogue invectif , ed. Eugénie Droz (Paris: H. Champion, 1923), 6. Given the desperate political stakes at the time, it is hardly far-fetched to discern in the homology la femme france another sign of the fight over who and how to represent France. On this development, see Colette Beaune's analysis, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late-Medieval France , trans. Susan Ross Huston, ed. Fredric L. Cheyette (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 289-92.

16. For another instance of this canonical figure, see Alan of Lille's twelfth-century account: "The slanderer resembles a scorpion in that a scorpion approaches the face of a virgin and consequently emits a sting and inflicts stinging injury from above. So too the slanderer. He offers favorable words face to face with men and then on the sly he concludes with the sting of a slanderer. And as if wounding them from above, he disparages the better ones" (Detractor scorpionis gerit imaginem, quia sicut scorpio praefert virginis vultum, et consequenter emittit aculeum, eta superiori vulnus infert acuatum; sic detractor in facie hominum verba favorabilia proponit, et in occulto aculeum detractionis concludit, et quasi a superiori vulnerans, melioribus detrahit). Alan of Lille, Summa de arte praedicatoria , printed in PL 210: 166B-C.

17. The discussion of the thirteenth-century canonist William of Drogheda will serve as a representative example of the high-medieval focus on these terms: "I lodge a complaint against N., who has committed an injury against me; namely, by calling me a prostitute's son, or thief or robber or farmer's son, he has written a defamatory pamphlet about me, or composed a defamatory song, or sung an abusive ditty about me; such an injury I would not want spread about. Since he had said or sung or written injuriously about me for a hundred pounds of silver, I seek to be given those hundred pounds, or I seek this injury to be made manifest through the action of iniuria ; and I take civil action . . . out of this same injury criminal action can be taken" (Conqueror de N., qui talem iniuriam [mihi intulit], scilicet vocando me filium meretricis vel furem vel latronem vel filium rustici vel scripsit de me famosum libellum vel composuit carmen famosum vel cantavit de me malum cantilenum quam iniuriam [vulgari] nollem, quod mihi dixisset vel cantasset vel scripsisset pro centum libris argenti, quas peto dari vel praestari actione iniuriaram; et ago civiliter. . . . Potest etiam agi criminaliter ex eadem iniuria). See Ludwig Wahrmund, Quellen zur Geschichte des Römisch-Kanonischen Processes im Mittelalter , 2 vols. (Innsbruck: Wagner, 1913), 2:2, 2:219.

18. My point here fits well with Kathy Eden's contention that the "influence of Greco-Roman legal theory on Christian ethics, generally, and on Augustinian ethics, in particular . . . bears significantly on the development of Christian literary theory." Poetic and Legal Fictions in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 138.

19. For a characteristically trenchant and witty assessment of this debate, see Stanley Fish, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a Good Thing Too (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 102-119.

20. She argues that "to reassert atomistic linear causality as a sine qua non of injury . . . is to refuse to respond to the true nature of this specific kind of harm." Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 157. It is interesting to note that MacKinnon's most recent arguments concerning the legal actionability of pornography explore the concept of verbal injury in the specific terms of defamation: "Pornography as Defamation and Discrimination," Boston University Law Review 71, no. 5 (November 1991): 793-815.

21. On this point see Wolfgang Iser, "Fictionalizing: The Anthropological Dimension of Literary Fictions," New Literary History 21, no. 4 (autumn 1990): 940-41.

22. The Excusacioun begins as a direct address to women:

Mes dames et mes damoiselles,
Se Dieu vous doint joye prouchaine,
Escoutés les durez nouvelles
Que j'ouÿ le jour de l'estraine.
(lines 1-4)

My ladies and young women, If God grants you joy soon again, Listen to the difficult news I heard on New Year's day.

But it quickly establishes the requisite dream frame:

Ce jour m'avint en sommeillant,
Actendant le soleil levant,
Moitié dormant, moitié veillant.
(lines 9-11)

That day it happened that I was drowsy, waiting for the sun to rise, half asleep, half awake.

23. "And I say that master Jean de Meun introduced characters in his book and makes each character speak in a manner that befits him; this is known, le jaloux like a jealous man, la vieille like an old woman, and so on with the others. And it is too wrongheaded to say that the author finds evil in woman as the jealous man claims, in keeping with his character" ([E]t dy que maistre Jehan de Meung en son livre introduisy personnaiges, et fait chascun personnaige parlet selonc qui luy appartient: c'est assavoir le Jaloux comme jaloux, la Vielie come la Vielle, et pareillement des autres. Et est trop mal pris de dire que l'aucteur tiengne les maulx estre en fame que le Jalous, en faisant son personnaige, propose; Hicks, 100).

24. Christine de Pizan hints at this shift in her critique of the Rose when she maintains: "Since human understanding can barely reach to the heights of a clear knowledge of earthly truths and understand hidden things . . . so it happens that one determines imagined things more believable through opinion rather than through sure science" (Pour ce que entendement humain ne puet estre eslevé jusques a haultesse de clere cognoissance d'entefine veritey entendre des choses occultes . . . convient par oppinion plus que de certainne science determiner des choses ymaginees plus voirsemblables; Hicks, 115).

25. On this revival see Gilbert Ouy, "Paris: L'un des principaux foyers de l'humanisme en Europe au début du XV ^e siècle," Bulletin de la société d'histoire de Paris et de l'Ile de France 94-95 (1967-68): 95, Eden, Poetic and Legal Fictions , 5, and Fumaroli, L'Age de l'éloquence , 18-19.

26. It is important to stress the difference between the issue of figurative speech and that of literary discourse. On this point see John Searle, "The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse," New Literary History 6, no. 2 (winter 1975), 320-21.

27. Boccaccio, Genealogie deorum gentilium , ed. Vincenzo Romano (Bari: Laterza, 1951), book 14; Petrarch, Collatio Laureationis , chap. 9. Stephanie H. Judd makes the compelling argument that such humanistic formulae and the distinctiveness of "literary" writing that they establish keep us from acknowledging the violence underwriting many humanistic narratives as well as "the judicial origins of our own practice of literary criticism." Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 2.

28. See Pierre-Yves Badel, " Le Roman de la rose" au XIV ^e siècle, 419-23.

29. Daniel Poirion's remark exemplifies this pattern of identification: "Elles [Jeanne, Katherine, Marie] demandent que l'auteur fasse amende honorable. L'Excusacioun ne les a pas satisfaites; mais elles l'ont mal lue." "Lectures de la Belle Dame sans mercy," Mélanges de langue et de littérature médiévales offerrs à Pierre Le Gentil (Paris: S.E.D.E.S., 1973), 693.

30. Let us not forget that the Belle Dame was by far the most popular of Chartier's works across Europe, being rapidly translated into English, Italian, and Catalan; See Piaget " La Belle Dame sans mercy et ses imitations," 25-26.

31. Louis Douët d'Arcq transcribes a variety of statements from the Châtelet registers in Choix de pièces inédites relatives au règne de Charles VI , 2 vols. (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1863-64), esp. 2:51, 2:131-32, 2:180-81, 2:185-87, 2:237-38, 2:270-72.

32. One remarkable case involves the rector of the University of Paris in the company of various magistri who sought justice at court on 19 July 1404 "for the abuse that is alleged to have been done last Monday past to the said University" (sur l'injure que on dit avoir este faicte lundi derrenier passe à ladicte Université; Douët d'Arcq, Choix de pièces inédites , 1:261-64).

33. In Peter Shervey Lewis's view, during Charles VI's reign, "litigation was incessant." Later Medieval France , 142. On this pattern of litigiousness, see Bernard Guenée, Tribunaux et gens de justice dans le bailliage de Senlis à la fin du moyen âge (vets 1300-vets 1550) , Publications de la Faculté des lettres de l'Université de Strasbourg no. 144 (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1963).

34. Douët d'Arcq, Choix de pièces inédites , 2:131, 2:190. This pattern suggests the growing importance of questions of personal honor that would dominate early-modern Europe. On this phenomenon, see Kristen B. Neuschel, Word of Honor: Interpreting Noble Culture in Sixteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 93-101.

35. Helmholz, Select Cases on Defamation to 1600 , xiv.

36. Alfred Soman, "Press, Pulpit, and Censorship in France Before Richelieu," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 120, no. 6 (December 1976): 445. England offers an analogous picture according to J. A. Sharpe, Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern England: The Church Courts at York (York: University of York, Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, 1980), 3.

37. In the surviving record, there are no individual women who bring complaints on their own, although by this period, we should remember, the requirement of a man's intervention had been, for all intents and purposes, superseded. That men and women sued together was often a matter of formality. See Annick Porteau-Bitker, "Criminalité et délinquance féminines dans le droit pénal des XIII ^e et XIV ^e siècles," Revue historique de droit français et étranger 58, no. 1 (January-March 1980): 24.

38. For a general etymological survey of libelle see Marc Angenot, La Parole pamphlétaire, 379-80.

39. This expression from the Corpus iuris civilis (book 9, xxxvi, de famosis libellis ) occurs in Gratian's Decretum (C. v, q. 1, c. 3) from whence it passes into every medieval legal commentary.

40. Jean de Montreuil's usage epitomizes this pattern: "I would like my error, which they would consider not a vice, but a sin and heresy (and this I cannot fail to have uttered), to be amended and corrected by you and in letters from you and the same lord and father, lest my error ever be related to my correctors and yours too, I might add, by vicious and vain rumor, and they construct from it charges of defamation ( libellos diffamatorios )" (Meum tamen errorem, qui non vicium putarent, sed peccatum et heresim (et illum non eructasse non possum), emendari et corrigi tuis et eiusdem domini mei et patris in litteris ate velim, ne, si vento aut aura levissima ad hos usque correctores meos—et tuos, dico—relatum si[t], libellos diffamatorios inde struant). Jean de Montreuil, Opera , 2 vols., ed. Ezio Ornato (Turin: G. Giappichelli, 1963), 1:39.

41. Carla Bozzolo and Hélène Loyau, La Cour amoureuse, dire de Charles VI: Étude et édition critique des sources manuscrites , 3 vols. (Paris: Léopard d'Or, 1982-92), 1:42.

42. For a brief description of this meaning, see Dictionnaire de droit canonique , s.v. libelle . For a history of the initial step in legal procedure it represents, see Artur Steinwenter, "Die Anfänge des Libellprozesses," Studia et documenta historiae et juris 1 (1935): 32-52.

43. Philippe de Beaumanoir, Philippe de Remi, de Beaumanoir: Coûtumes de Beauvaisis , 2 vols., ed. Amédée Salmon (Paris: A. Picard et fils, 1899-1900), 1: 98.

44. Philippe de Beaumanoir, The Coûtumes de Beauvaisis of Philippe de Beaumanoir , trans. F. R. P. Akehurst (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 76.

45. "Liber, ibis in urbem," (Go, little book, go into the city); Lamentations , line 1; LeFèvre's translation, lines 83-84. Whereas this turn of phrase begins Ovid's work in exile, the Tristia , its invocation here has as much to do with the crucial place and function of texts in the civic sector as many late-fourteenth-century writers understood it. This becomes clear in a subsequent passage that LeFèvre inserts in Matheolus's text:

La grant doleur dont je labeure,
(Je ne suis a repos nulle heure)
Afin que, quant ils orront dire,
Ils ne se puissent escondire
Ne excuser par ignorance.

Fay publier par toute France
Que nul, s'il n'a ou corps la rage,
Plus ne se mette en mariage,
Et mesmement par bigamie.
(lines 95-103)

I labor under considerable pain—finding repose at no hour—so that when they'll hear speak of it, they will not be able to avoid it, or excuse themselves through ignorance. I am having it publicized through all of France, that no one, no matter what his bodily lusts, should engage in marriage, or similarly, in bigamy.

46. Invoking infamia is no idle rhetorical gesture, since by the mid-thirteenth century there could be no greater penalty. For the development of the doctrine of infamy, see Edward Peters, Torture (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 45-53.

47. Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de la Cité des dames , ed. Curnow, 1:624.

48. For contemporaneous incidents of book burning, see Paul Lacroix, Histoire de l'imprimerie et des arts qui se rattachent à la typographie (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971), 26, and Félibien and Lobineau, Histoire de la ville de Paris , 4: 563.

49. R. I. Moore considers the social manipulation that went into identifying the heretic: The Formation of a Persecuting Society , 144-47.

50. The naming of "our advocates Dessarteaulx and Chastel" has been the subject of much speculation since "Chastel" was the name of Christine de Pizan's son, who served as a lawyer and notary in the Parisian court as well as at the Dauphin's court at Bourges. But just as we must be wary of identifying "Jeanne, Katherine, and Marie" as individual damoiselles d'honneur , we must take care in identifying M. Chastel. This is all the more important in light of the symbolic charge of the name ''chastel" and its use as a figure for women.

51. The earliest, the Parlement d'amour of Baudet Harenc remains unedited. Of the ten known manuscripts, I consulted Paris, B.N. f. fr. 1727, fols. 136-44 verso. Arthur Piaget comments on the Parlement : " La Belle Dame sans mercy et ses imitations," Romania 30 (1901) 317-20. The rest of the poems are edited by him in the ongoing series of articles of the same name: "La Dame leale en amours," Romania 30 (1901): 323-51; "La Cruelle Femme en amour" Romania 31 (1902): 322-49; "Les Erreurs du jugement de la Belle Dame sans mercy," Romania 33 (1904): 183-99; and "Le Jugement du povre triste amant banny," Romania 34 (1905): 379-416.

52. This is a debate that Wesley Trimpi surveys exhaustively in "The Ancient Hypothesis of Fiction: An Essay on the Origins of Literary Theory," Traditio 27 (1971), 1-78, and "The Quality of Fiction: The Rhetorical Transmission of Literary Theory," Traditio 30 (1974), 1-118; esp. 108-18.

53. In Ernst H. Kantorowicz's commentary on this formula, he surmises "the jurists not only fell in with the literary and artistic theories, but may have had even the function of pathfinders, since they embarked on that theory—derived from the Roman laws of adoption—much earlier than others." The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 302-12, esp. 307.

54. Pierre Legendre goes even so far as to insist on "fiction figuring truth" as a pivotal problematic for late-medieval legal thought, a telling theorem in light of today's Critical Legal Studies movement: Ecrits juridiques du moyen âge occidental (London: Variorum Reprints, 1988), XI, 514.

55. This strategy also governs another of Chartier's defenses, the "Erreurs du jugement de la Belle Dame sans mercy"; see lines 44-48.

56. On the emergence of the concept of lèse-majesté in this period, See S. H. Cuttler, The Law of Treason and Treason Trials in Later Medieval France , Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 3rd series, vol. 16 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 14-21.

57. Walter Ullman sees the late-fourteenth-century pattern of kings, popes, and their legal counsels debating crimen laesae majestatis as an effort to pin down the idea of sovereignty: Law and Jurisdiction in the Middle Ages , ed. George Garnett (London: Variorum Reprints, 1988), VII, 24. P.S. Lewis advances much the same view in Later Medieval France , 82-87. What is of particular interest to us, however, is the way this problem is generalized to refer to myriad infractions. As Jacques Chiffoleau analyzes it: "Il faut attendre le XV ^e siècle pour observer chez les juristes une extension importante, une dilatation progressive des qualifications du crime de majesté qui finit par absorber une quantité de crimes communs." "Dire l'indicible: Remarques sur la catégorie du nefandum du XII ^e au XV ^e siècle," Annales E.S.C. 45, no. 2 (March-April 1990): 294.

58. "[S]o that I, who don't forsake my masters and benefactors without giving my all to the very last, at least as far as I will be able—do not allow their honor to be attacked either" (ut qui magistros et benefactores meos ad extremum usque singultum non desero, aut suo in honore—quoad potero—[non] sinam ledi). Hicks, 30. The key word, again, is laedere .

59. Et semble que tel chose infame,
Scelon ce que d'elle est escript,
Ne soit pas comme une aultre fame,
Mais soit quelque maulvais esprit
Qui ymaige de feme prit.
Pour mettre a mort vrai ammoreux
( Cruelle Femme , lines 681-86)

And it appears that such an infamous thing, according to what is written of her, could not be like any other woman, but like some evil spirit that took the form of a woman to put to death the true lover.

60. "Mais, je diray, par ficcion, le fait de la mutacion comment de femme devins homme." Christine de Pizan, La Mutacion de Fortune , lines 150-53.

61. On this phrase, "the key to" as an index of the concern over censorship, see Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Reading and Writing in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 7-8.