Narration and Personification Allegory in Machaut’s Vergier

Abstract

Guillaume de Machaut’s first narrative poem, the Dit du Vergier, has been dismissed as being an inferior imitation of the Roman de la Rose and generally disregarded as of any importance in the poet’s oeuvre beyond its existence as a kind of schoolboy exercise. This essay contests that view, arguing that it deserves a more appreciative reading. In its use of first-person narration and personification allegory in imitation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, the Vergier both sets the pattern in general for the Machaldian dit and serves as the direct model for the Prologue, composed as an introduction to his oeuvre in the collected works manuscripts whose production Machaut oversaw in the last years of his life.