Le Voir Dit: a reconstruction and a guide for musicians

Abstract

Guillaume de Machaut's autobiographical poem, Le Voir Dit, has been known to musicians mainly by reputation. In 1928 Friedrich Ludwig printed extracts from passages on music in the introduction to his edition of Machaut's complete musical works, in 1969 Sarah Jane Williams examined Machaut's remarks about manuscript production, and in a more general article, for the 1977 Machaut anniversary, she introduced Le Voir Dit to non-specialists. On the whole, however, musicians have been content to leave study of the complete text to scholars of Middle French. Their priorities are, of course, very different; much of the most influential writing on Le Voir Dit from the last twenty years has been concerned to show how the text might be read in a structuralist or post-structuralist manner, and has placed relatively little emphasis on more positivistic questions such as how the text was compiled or its relationship to the historical persons and events it mentions. Yet to anyone interested in the origins and function of this extraordinary document such issues seem fundamental; indeed, the historically minded reader might wonder how the text can be understood at all until such matters have been addressed.