(Fr.).
The name given to literary and musical confraternities, often religious, founded mainly in northern France from the 12th century, and to the competitions sponsored by them. The word probably derives from the Latin podium, referring to a raised platform from which competing compositions were delivered or judged or both. The trouvère Adam de la Halle, who competed in the puy of his native Arras, was the first to use the word to mean a society holding literary competitions.
Religious confraternities, most of them devoted to the Virgin Mary, were established in many cities of north-eastern France in the 12th and 13th centuries, and they flourished in Normandy from the 15th century. Abbeville, Arras, Beauvais, Caen, Dieppe, Douai, Evreux, Lille, London, Paris, Rouen, Tournai and Valenciennes are known to have had puys in the Middle Ages or Renaissance. The confraternities were generally made up of both clerics and laymen, aristocracy and bourgeois. Many existed first to sponsor special services on one or more Marian feast days, sometimes accompanied by a para-liturgical spectacle and a banquet, and only later instituted poetry competitions in connection with those established practices. In time, however, the competitions came to be the focus of the annual celebrations, and by the 17th century many of the Norman puys redefined themselves as literary academies. A number of puys survived in this form until the Revolution.
The poetry competitions elicited submissions in the vernacular formes fixes and, more rarely, in Latin. The musical settings were generally strophic. Only Evreux's 16th-century puy of St Cecilia awarded prizes for through-composed polyphony (attracting two submissions from Orlande de Lassus). Some competitors were professional men of letters, such as the historian Jean Froissart who won prizes at the puys of Valenciennes, Tournai, Abbeville and Lille, while others apparently were local amateurs. Although the surviving evidence is incomplete it seems that the invitations usually established the parameters for competition in various categories for a given year, often stipulating in each division the poem's subject, form and refrain. At Amiens the refrain for each year was included on a scroll in a panel painting showing the Virgin surrounded by contemporary figures, which was displayed in the cathedral in advance of the competition. The poetic forms most often specified are the chant royal, Jeu-parti (involving two authors), serventois and ballade (see Ballade (i)). In the 15th and 16th centuries treatises on versification were written in direct response to the requirements of the various puys. Pierre Fabri's Le grant et vrai art de pleine rhétorique (1521), for example, supplies rules for the verse forms admitted to Rouen's puy. The prizes were sometimes symbolic (such as a palm, lily or rose), redeemable for a fixed sum of money, and they sometimes took the form of signet rings embellished with imagery and/or verse. The winning chants royaux at the puy of Amiens for the years 1460–1517 and copies of the paintings that announced the refrains are contained in F-Pn fr.145, a presentation manuscript for Louise de Savoie. F-Pn fr.379 (2nd quarter of the 16th century) is an illuminated collection of chants royaux, ballades and rondeaux in honour of the Virgin from the puy of Rouen.
See also Medieval drama, §III, 3(ii), and Troubadours, trouvères.
G. Gros: Le poète, la vièrge et le prince du Puy: étude sur les Puys marials de la France du Nord du XIVe siècle à la Renaissance (Paris, 1992)
A.F. Sutton: ‘Merchants, Music and Social Harmony: the London Puy and its French and London Contexts, circa 1300’, London Journal, xvii (1992), 1–17
E.C. Teviotdale: ‘The Invitation to the Puy d'Evreux’, CMc, no.52 (1993), 7–26
ELIZABETH C. TEVIOTDALE