Intertextual Entanglements: Jean Molinet Reconfigures the Courtly in His Debate of the Wolf and the Sheep

This article reads the late-fifteenth-century Debat du leup et du mouton by the celebrated rhétoriqueur poet Jean Molinet through the lens of two poetic monuments, the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose and Alain Chartier’s Belle Dame sans mercy ( c . 1424), and includes a brief consideration of the early-fifteenth-century quarrels concerning the latter. In its innovative staging of a scene of seduction, Molinet’s debate creatively adapts and transforms both prior texts, moving away from the cultural and poetic register of courtly love and erotic pursuit, and into a spiritual framework that invites readers to perceive seduction as an internal phenomenon, and resistance as a practice that allows for the mastery of unruly and irrational desires. Molinet makes strategic use of epiphonema, or proverbs, to connect specific passages, characters, and ideas intertextually, in order to afford readers the pleasures of recognition and comparison, and guide them in an active reading practice that requires the ongoing evaluation of the words and deeds of others. This practice may also be turned inward, enabling readers to assess their own desires, and ideally direct their decisions, in ways that conform to the spiritual kernel located within what Molinet calls the ‘shell’ of his debate. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .