The “Jeu de la feuillée” between carnival culture and literary culture

Abstract

The Jeu de la feuillée by Adam de la Halle, a pivotal text for the history of medieval theater, stands at the intersection of a double legacy: that of literary culture, and of carnival culture. The traits of the latter – as they have been enunciated by Mikhail Bakhtin – are essentially all present in the work, forming a coherent system, one which endowed with meaning: the essay, after having reviewed the ways in which those traits are presented and are actualized in the Jeu, addresses the question (a crucial one from the philological point of view) of the conditions that allow Adam, an intellectual, to make the layer (non-literary or pre-literary) of carnival culture emerge at the level of literature, allowing its transmission down to us. The article is closed by a Postilla in which the author suggests some working hypotheses on specific points of the Jeu de la feuillée.