Старофранцузские дебаты: на стыке импровизации и театрализации

Литературоведческий журнал. 2026. № 4.

Любавина А. А.

The article examines whether the jeu-parti — a genre of trouvère poetry that took shape within the Puy of Arras — was genuinely improvised or composed in advance. The first part offers a historiographical survey of a debate that scholarship has conducted since the early nineteenth century: from early studies that took the poets’ claims of spontaneity at face value, to twentieth-century theories that rejected improvisation on the strength of the genre’s metrical and thematic complexity, and finally to recent scholarship that increasingly favours it. In the second part the author turns directly to the texts in order to trace signs of oral and spontaneous composition. Drawing on Paul Zumthor’s concept of improvisation and Hans Robert Jauss’s notion of the “horizon of expectation,” the author argues that the nature of the jeu-parti reduces neither to pure improvisation nor to a fully prepared text. The study advances the claim that jeux-partis stood at the intersection of improvisation and theatricalization: performers generated the substance of the debate in the moment, while they agreed its formal parameters — rhyme scheme, metre and melody — beforehand. The author further suggests that jongleurs re-performed the debates repeatedly, which explains both their wide manuscript circulation and the stability of the participants’ names across all surviving versions. The jeu-parti thus emerges as a playful, performative genre that drew the entire audience into the contest.

Keywords: средневековый театр, Адам де ла Аль, труверы, жё-парти, Жан Бретель