Controlling Readers: Guillaume de Machaut and his Late Medieval Audience

Abstract

Deborah McGrady uses Guillaume de Machaut's celebrated Voir Dit as a case study in the late medieval reception of vernacular poetry, with particular attention to the ways in which authors vied with readers, bookmakers and oral performers for control over the text and its transmission. McGrady's approach to these questions is essentially three-pronged. Firstly, she analyses the Voir Dit itself, tracing its depiction of the processes of reading, writing and performance, analysing its portrayal of the poet and his different audiences: the lady, ‘Toute-Belle’, to whom he addresses his letters and songs; the aristocratic patrons for whom he works; and the larger audience of all those who see, hear or hear of the poems and letters once he has sent them to Toute-Belle. Machaut's interest — one might say obsession — with all aspects of the literary process, including the oral and written transmission of his works, has been well documented and discussed in Machaut criticism over the last few decades, but McGrady provides interesting perspectives on this familiar ground, highlighting the ways in which the Voir Dit is riven by competing versions of the story its narrator struggles to control. In her second section, McGrady provides detailed studies of the three best-known manuscripts containing the Voir Dit (Machaut MSS A, F-G and E). Her analyses of such elements as script, page layout, presence or absence of music, marginalia, use of scribal abbreviations and illustrations, allows her to identify different ways in which scribal editors ‘packaged’ the text for different kinds of readers, and the different character that the text assumes as a result. These three chapters make for very interesting reading and are an excellent example of the valuable lessons to be learned from a holistic approach to the study of medieval manuscripts. In her third section, finally, McGrady discusses specific medieval readers of the Voir Dit: the poets Eustache Deschamps and Jean Froissart, and the remanieur responsible for an abridged and reworked version of the Voir Dit in the fifteenth-century manuscript Pierpont Morgan, MS M 396. Machaut's profound influence on both Deschamps and Froissart has long been recognized, but McGrady's analyses shed much new light on the ways in which these authors both acknowledged and challenged Machaut's poetic authority, and rewrote his portrayal of the dynamic relationship between author and reader. McGrady's analysis of the Morgan manuscript, finally, is a fascinating window on the later reception of Machaut, and an important reminder that even a much-admired master was still at the mercy of the scribes and bookmakers who reshaped his oeuvre for a new generation of readers. This is an important book, both in Machaut studies, and in the larger field of late medieval French literature and its manuscript traditions.