Medieval Debate Poetry - History and Precedents

History and Precedents

Debate poems were common in Mesopotamian Sumerian-language literature (first half of the 3rd millennium BC) and were part of the tradition of Arsacid and Sassanid Persian literature (third century BC - seventh century AD), continued in later medieval Islamic Persian literature.

The European debate poem first appeared as a literary form in the eighth and ninth centuries, during the Carolingian Renaissance. Beginning in the late ninth century, European clergymen began writing debate poems in Latin. The first example we have of the form is Conflictus Veris et Hiemis (Contention of Spring and Winter), which was written in the late eighth century and is commonly attributed to Alcuin. This poem formally marks the birth of medieval debate poetry and established a pattern for later poems of the genre – it is light hearted but slightly academic, the exchanges in it are few but succinct, the debate is carefully balanced and the issue at hand is resolved.

At the time, a preoccupation with dichotomies in the world was evident in nearly every type of literature, but only debate poetry was devoted entirely to the exploration of these dichotomies. The idea was that every thing – whether it be concrete, abstract, alive or inanimate – had a natural and logical opposite, and this conception was only bolstered by the religious language being used by the Catholic Church at the time. Oppositions abounded between things like the old and new testament, vice and virtue, sins of the spirit and sins of the flesh, good and evil, God and Satan, human and divine, redemption and damnation. Additionally, this conception was bolstered by the presence of overt dichotomies in the natural world, such as night and day, summer and winter, sea and land, male and female, sun and moon, youth and old age. The purpose of the debate poem, then, is to pit one of these things against its opposite.

Virgil's Eclogues features two shepherds engaging in "a game of wit", and this may be an early form of the debate poems of later centuries. The style of debate depicted in Conflictus Veris et Hiemis can also be seen in the late 14th century Debate of the Body and Soul, where the narrator dreams about a corpse and its spirit arguing over who is responsible for their mutual damnation during life, with each asserting that the other led them astray. Beast fables were also well known in late medieval England, including as The Bestiary and The Fox and the Wolf, some adapted from continental originals. Such animals are referred to in period literature and are depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry.

The genre was dominated by European clergymen until the 12th century, and it wasn't until the 13th century that debate poetry began to flourish in many of the vernacular literatures of Europe, which it did until the 16th century. As the Middle Ages waned, so did the literary form of debate poetry. A small number of debate poems of questionable importance were produced during the Renaissance, and thus the debate poem is primarily a medieval phenomenon.