French Literature Reviews - 2026
Amandine Mussou, Le Savoir en jeu. Les Eschés amoureux, une fiction critique.
Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Les Eschés amoureux, a thirty-thousand-line allegorical poem in octosyllables written in the 1370s by Évrart de Conty, personal physician to Charles V, presents itself as a response to the Roman de la Rose. Left unfinished in the surviving manuscripts, this verse text was soon overshadowed by its prose commentary, Le Livre des eschez amoureux moralisés, written a few years later by the same author. Engaging in a continuous dialogue with both of these vast encyclopedic narratives, Les Eschés amoureux fictionalizes knowledge from various origins (chess strategies, advice on love—including a translation of Ovid's Remedia amoris—musical knowledge, and practical precepts drawn from a translation of Giles of Rome's De regimine principum…). This study examines the strategies of knowledge dissemination at work in the verse version of Les Eschés amoureux and demonstrates how the text functions as a critical fiction that invites a close re-reading of the numerous authorities it summons.
Amandine Mussou is Associate Professor of Medieval French Language and Literature at Université Paris Cité and a member of CERILAC.
Excerpt from the introduction...
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Written in the 1370s by Évrart de Conty, Les Eschés amoureux is a massive allegorical poem that responds directly to the tradition of the Roman de la Rose. It weaves together diverse medieval traditions, encompassing chess strategy, Ovidian love lore, musical theory, and political philosophy derived from Giles of Rome. Although the verse text was eventually overshadowed by its own extensive prose commentary, it represents a remarkable high-medieval synthesis of encyclopedic learning and vernacular poetic ambition during the reign of Charles V.
This scholarly study by Amandine Mussou investigates how the poem functions as a critical fiction, examining the poetic and intellectual strategies behind its dissemination of knowledge. By demonstrating how the text reinterprets classical and contemporary authorities, the book offers valuable insights for specialists in medieval French literature, textual scholarship, and the history of ideas. It serves as an essential resource for readers exploring the intersections of poetry, philosophy, and pedagogy in late-medieval French and Francophone culture.