Philippe de Rémi (Old French:Phelipe de Remi) (1210–1265) was anOld French poet andtrouvère fromPicardy, and thebailli of theGâtinais from 1237 to at least 1249. He was also the father ofPhilippe de Beaumanoir, the famous jurist, by his wife Marie.
By 1255 Philippe was aknight (chevalier) and thesire (orseigneur) ofBeaumanoir. In 1257 he served at the court of theCountess of Artois,Amicie de Courtenay, to arbitrate a dispute between the house ofHaute-Avesnes and Guillaume de Hesdigneul. He remained at the court of Artois until 1259, when he retired to his estate atRemy. He died there in 1265. Besides his middle child, Philippe, he left an elder son, Girard (Gérard), who succeeded him as sire, and a daughter, Péronelle, his children by first wife, Marie. He also left behind his second wife, Alice de Bailleul, whom he had married by 1262 and who was living in 1267.[1]
Henri Léonard Bordier first identified the poet with the jurist in 1868. In 1894 this was challenged by V. Zeidler, who argued thatJehan et Blonde was the basis for theGerman poemWillehalm von Orlens byRudolf von Ems, composed in 1242. This necessitated identifying poet with bailli. This was widely discredited until 1981, when Bernard Gicquel rejuvenated the hypothesis that aspects ofWillehalm were derived fromJehan and from thehastilude sequence atRessons inLa Manekine. R.-H. Bautier follows Gicquel, but revises the biography of the father slightly. According to him, Alice was Philippe's wife as early as 1252 and the younger Philippe was born between then and 1254. He suggests that Philippe'sromances were composed while he was bailli and that the poems were written between 1250 and 1262 (or 1265).[1] Jean Dufournet and Marie-Madeleine Castellani also follow Gicquel. Sylvie Lécuyer in her edition ofJehan et Blonde (Paris, 1984), refused to use "Philippe de Beaumanoir" of the author in order to avoid linking him with the jurist, his son.
Philippe wrote some 20,000 verses of poems and two romances,La Manekine andJehan et Blonde. All of his work is preserved inB.N.,f.fr. 1588, an early fourteenth-century manuscript fromAmiens orVermandois. There are elevenchansons outside of this manuscript withAlfred Jeanroy attributed to him.[2]
Among his poem is a uniquesalut d'amour, one of only four such pieces withrefrains, and the only one with an identified author. It beginsDouce amie, salus vous mande and includes eight refrains.[3] It has been called asalut à refrains analogous to achanson avec des refrains.
Among Philippe's most studied works are hisnonsense poems calledFatrasies andOiseuses. Hiscourtly love poetry has been under-studied.
