Huon de Méry (fl. 1200–1250) was the author of (modern , "The Tournament of the Antichrist"), a 3,546-line Old French poem written in octosyllables.William W. Kibler, Medieval France: An Encyclopedia (Garland, 1995), p. 467.
Life Huon's life is a matter of conjecture based on references in his work. He seems to have been a Norman who took part in the wars against Pierre Mauclerc, Duke of Brittany, during the minority of Louis IX (1232–1235). Linguistic analysis suggests that he came from northwestern France, with the name de Méry (which might also be spelled Merri or Méru) pointing to Méru, Oise; Méry-Corbon, Calvados; or Merry, Orne.Keith Busby, Codex and Context: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in Manuscript (Rodopi, 2002), p. 577. He wrote while he was a monk at Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
The Tournament of the Antichrist Published around 1234–1240, is a psychomachia drawing on both allegory and romance.Keith Busby, "Hunbaut and the Art of Medieval French Romance," in Conjunctures: Medieval Studies in Honor of Douglas Kelly (Rodopi, 1994), p. 49. The forces of God array in an apocalyptic struggle against those of the Antichrist. God's troops are made up of personified Virtues, archangels, and Arthurian knights. Vices, pagan gods, and peasants fight for the Antichrist.
Huon articulates a view of courtly love that distinguishes between love ("without wrongdoing") and fornication: "Love is born of courtesy" ().Douglas Kelly, Medieval Imagination: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Courtly Love (University of Wisconsin Press, 1978, 1981), p. 15. While Huon introduces courtly figures into the conventional battle of Vices and Virtues, love is not the poem's primary preoccupation.Kelly, Medieval Imagination, p. 95. During the battle, the narrator is wounded in the eye by Cupid's arrow and seeks refuge in a monastery.
is contemporary with the Roman de la Rose, and contains allusions to the Yvain of Chrétien de Troyes and the Songe d'enfer of Raoul de Houdenc. It enjoyed an "ample" manuscript tradition.Busby, Codex and Context, pp. 577–578, with a fairly detailed survey. Huon self-consciously acknowledges literary precedent, and views the Arthurian world as bygone and thoroughly explored by his poetic masters.Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann, The Evolution of Arthurian Romance: The Verse Tradition from Chrétien to Froissart (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 35. At the same time, he asserts his own inventiveness with his distinctive conjointure of material.Douglas Kelly, The Conspiracy of Allusion: Description, Rewriting, and Authorship from Macrobius to Medieval Romance (Brill, 1999), pp. 218–220.
References
External links Edition under the modern French title of Le Tornoiement de l'Antechrist par Huon de Mery (Reims, 1851), full text.
List of manuscripts of the work at Arlima