The Puy d'Arras, called in its own day the Puy Notre-Dame, was a medieval poetical society

Puy (society)

A puy or pui was a society, often organised as a guild or confraternity, sometimes along religious lines, for the patronisation of music and poetry, typically through the holding of competitions...

 formed in Arras

Arras

Arras is the capital of the Pas-de-Calais department in northern France. The historic centre of the Artois region, its local speech is characterized as a Picard dialect...

 for holding contests between trouvère

Trouvère

Trouvère , sometimes spelled trouveur , is the Northern French form of the word trobador . It refers to poet-composers who were roughly contemporary with and influenced by the troubadours but who composed their works in the northern dialects of France...

s and pour maintenir amour et joie (for maintaining love and joy, i.e. the courtly love

Courtly love

Courtly love was a medieval European conception of nobly and chivalrously expressing love and admiration. Generally, courtly love was secret and between members of the nobility. It was also generally not practiced between husband and wife....

 lyric

Lyric poetry

Lyric poetry is a genre of poetry that expresses personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient world, lyric poems were those which were sung to the lyre. Lyric poems do not have to rhyme, and today do not need to be set to music or a beat...

). The term puy is Old French

Old French

Old French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories that span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from the 9th century to the 14th century...

 for "place of eminence", from Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 podium

Podium

A podium is a platform that is used to raise something to a short distance above its surroundings. It derives from the Greek πόδι In architecture a building can rest on a large podium. Podia can also be used to raise people, for instance the conductor of an orchestra stands on a podium as do many...

. The president of the Puy, elected annually, was titled the Prince du Puy, and he presided over the competitions, which were decided by panels of judges. The Puy was under the nominal patronage of the Virgin Mary, referred to as "Notre Dame du Puy d'Arras". Other puys under her patronage were founded at Amiens

Amiens

Amiens is a city and commune in northern France, north of Paris and south-west of Lille. It is the capital of the Somme department in Picardy...

, Boulogne-sur-Mer

Boulogne-sur-Mer

-Road:* Metropolitan bus services are operated by the TCRB* Coach services to Calais and Dunkerque* A16 motorway-Rail:* The main railway station is Gare de Boulogne-Ville and located in the south of the city....

, Caen

Caen

Caen is a commune in northwestern France. It is the prefecture of the Calvados department and the capital of the Basse-Normandie region. It is located inland from the English Channel....

, Évreux

Évreux

Évreux is a commune in the Eure department, of which it is the capital, in Haute Normandie in northern France.-History:In late Antiquity, the town, attested in the fourth century CE, was named Mediolanum Aulercorum, "the central town of the Aulerci", the Gallic tribe then inhabiting the area...

, and Rouen

Rouen

Rouen , in northern France on the River Seine, is the capital of the Haute-Normandie region and the historic capital city of Normandy. Once one of the largest and most prosperous cities of medieval Europe , it was the seat of the Exchequer of Normandy in the Middle Ages...

.

The Puy is less well-documented than the contemporary Confrérie des jongleurs et bourgeois d'Arras

Confrérie des jongleurs et bourgeois d'Arras

The Confrérie des jongleurs et bourgeois d'Arras was a fraternity of jongleurs founded in Arras in or around 1175. As its name implies, it was intended for jongleurs and the bourgeoisie, not just the knightly class. It also did not hold poetic contests...

, and the two are sometimes conflated. The statutes of the Puy d'Arras do not survive, only the later ones of the Puy d'Amiens from 1471 shed any light on the nature of laws of the puys. The Puy d'Arras was, unlike the Confrérie, neither social nor religious in conception. It was the creation of the urban patriciate, the wealthy and noble, plus some others, possibly those excluded from the Confrérie, who determined to maintain the courtly tradition. The Puy was thus more conservative than the Confrérie.

The poets Andrieu Contredit d'Arras

Andrieu Contredit d'Arras

Andrieu Contredit d'Arras was a trouvère from Arras and active in the Puy d'Arras. "Contredit" is probably a nickname. He wrote mostly grand chants, but also a pastourelle, a lai, and a jeu-parti with Guillaume li Vinier....

 and Jean de Renti (criticisingly) make mention of it and its contests. Jean Bretel mentions it in his works and he is recorded elsewhere as having served a term as Prince. Robert Sommeillon was also a Prince. Undoubtedly the highest personage to attend the Puy's festivals was Theobald I of Navarre

Theobald I of Navarre

Theobald I , called the Troubadour, the Chansonnier, and the Posthumous, was Count of Champagne from birth and King of Navarre from 1234...

. The high standing of the Puy is evidenced in the thirteenth-century poem Dit artésien.

By the nature of its activities, one of the favoured verse forms of the Puy was the jeu parti

Jeu parti

Jeu parti [Fr.; Occitan joc partit, “partimen”]. A debate or dialogue in the form of a poem. According to Guilhem Molinier, the author of Las leys d'amors, a 13th-century treatise on how to write poetry in the style of the troubadours, there is a clear difference between a partimen and a tenso: in...

. Women could also participate in the Puy, both as contestants, audience members, and as judges. It has been suggested that the chansonnier

Chansonnier

A chansonnier is a manuscript or printed book which contains a collection of chansons, or polyphonic and monophonic settings of songs, hence literally "song-books," although some manuscripts are so called even though they preserve the text but not the music A chansonnier is a manuscript or...

known as trouvère manuscript R, which contains no musical notation and is rather unornamented, was compiled from oral performance at the Puy d'Arras.