The image of the court of Amour in Martin Le Franc’s “Champion of Ladies”: courtly space and Christian love.

The paper examines the features of the image of a typical courtly space (the court of Amour) in the context of the Christian concept of love (charity) expressed by Martin Le Franc in his poem “The Champion of Ladies” (c. 1441–1442). The court of Amour (an allegorical figure representing courtly love) was usually described as a garden. However, Martin, a cleric, prefers Christian values to courtly ones; love for him is a symbol of harmony, an absolute ideal. The purpose of the study is to identify differences in the description of the court of Amour in this poem from traditional medieval allegorical poems descriptions; determine the basic principles of organizing the space in the text and their connection with the author's views on love; explain the role of this episode. Methods of comprehensive and contextual text analysis, as well as descriptive and cultural-historical research methods are used in this paper. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that the analysis of space in “The Champion of Ladies” is carried out sequentially for the first time. Also, this French allegorical poem has not been studied in Russian literary criticism. The analysis reveals the following features: the space of the court of Amour becomes more complex; the court of Amour has its double in Venus’s domain; the contrast between these spaces is based on a number of oppositions (top-bottom, light-dark, etc.). Space gets a moral characteristic, there are more Christian motifs, the images of the described locations reflect the images of Amour and Venus and refer to two sides of love (ideal, Christian and deceiving, sensual love). A typically courteous episode serves to attract the attention of the public, as Martin seeks to convey his views to a wide range of readers from the aristocratic environment.

Martin Le Franc, medieval French literature, allegory, allegorical poem, courtly love, charity, ideal space, Amour, Venus, querelle des femmes