Abstract
"The Text Recontextualized in Performance: Deschamps' Prelection of Machaut's Voir Dit to the Count of Flanders." In 1375, Philip the Bold and John of Gaunt met in Bruges to seek an end to France and England's ongoing struggle over sovereignty. Among the many ceremonies and events attending on this meeting was a short prelection (public reading) by the French poet Eustache Deschamps to the court of Louis de Mâle, count of Flanders and host of the negotiations. As a later ballade informs us, the text Deschamps read was a short passage about Fortune from Guillaume de Machaut's Voir Dit. This article examines how Deschamps cleverly adapted Machaut's misogynistic portrait of a whorish Fortune to the austere political context of these high-level negotiations. It traces the implications of this virtuosic recontextualization for the text, the performance, the audience, and, finally, for the reader himself.
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