Voir Dit Research Articles

Machaut and the Medieval Apprenticeship Tradition: Truth, Fiction, and Poetic Craft by Douglas Kelly

Reviewed by: Machaut and the Medieval Apprenticeship Tradition: Truth, Fiction, and Poetic Craft by Douglas Kelly Claire Konieczny (bio) Douglas Kelly. Machaut and the Medieval Apprenticeship Tradition: Truth, Fiction, and Poetic Craft. D.S. Brewer, 2014. 378 pages. ISBN-13: 978–1843843726. Having composed nearly 400 poems of different types during his life, spanning from ballads to rondeaux to laments, Guillaume de Machaut was not only one of the most popular poets of the fourteenth century, but also one of the most influential. Douglas Kelly's book, Machaut and the Medieval Apprenticeship Tradition: Truth, Fiction, and Poetic Craft, is a comprehensive study of this seminal figure of medieval writing. While taking into account most of Machaut's works, Kelly accords special significance to Machaut's chef d'œuvre, his narrative poem the Voir Dit. In this poem, an aged master poet named Guillaume takes on a beautiful apprentice, a young woman given only the name "Toute Belle." In a letter containing a sample of her poetry, Toute Belle requests that Guillaume instruct her in the art of poetry; Guillaume agrees, and the two fall instantly in love. The Voir Dit then narrates both the development of their love, as well as the apprenticeship of Toute Belle and her study of the art of poetry. While forming the basis for his analysis around this tale, Kelly takes into account the full scope of Machaut's influence—his "art of love, his art of poetry, and his legacy" (xi). These three aspects of Kelly's analysis of Machaut structure his book as well: first, Kelly explores Machaut's changing perspectives on love throughout his corpus (Machaut's art of love), culminating in the Voir Dit; second, Kelly focuses on the technical elements of Machaut's poetry (Machaut's art of poetry); third, Kelly addresses Machaut's influence upon other poets of the time (Machaut's legacy). Focusing first on Machaut's art of love, Kelly addresses Machaut's search to define what Kelly terms "good love," that is, the "perfect" way to love another. Kelly analyzes Machaut's developments on the concept of "good love" throughout all of his major works. Broadly speaking, Kelly draws out a trend in Machaut's writings that redefines "good love" not as based in physical desire, but as one that is chaste, pure, and therefore perfectly happy. This idea of Machaut's concerning "good love" is for Kelly epitomized in the Voir Dit, as Kelly points to the fact that desire on the part of the beautiful young Toute Belle for the ugly old poet is unlikely. Their love is a chaste one, and when Guillaume allows desire to lead him astray from the path of "good love" and cloud his judgement, Toute Belle recalls him to virtue. Thus, the Voir [End Page 1123] Dit narrates the story of two apprenticeships: that of Toute Belle in the art of poetry as well as that of Guillaume in the art of "good love." Continuing his investigation of Machaut's "art of love," Kelly then turns to Machaut's ideas on the relationship between truth and fiction, as Machaut understands it. Kelly states that the narrative of the Voir Dit suggests that there must be some underlying truth to writing poetry about love; that is, good love poetry cannot be written in the absence of love. Further adding to this basis of truth is the fact that one of the main characters in the Voir Dit is a master poet named Guillaume—whether "de Machaut" should follow that first name is unclear, and Kelly shies away from fully clarifying this ambiguity. However, I suggest that the name of the master poet in the Voir Dit again points to an underlying structure of truth in the fictional poem. As the dit genre of poetry is both poetic and narrative in nature, one must recall that the Voir Dit is in reality a fictional narrative. Kelly writes that while the Voir Dit may be inspired by reality, its fictitious nature allows Machaut to convey what Machaut believes to be universal truths concerning love; a fully autobiographical story would limit the universality of the truths. Exploring further Machaut's "art of...

Machaut and the Medieval Apprenticeship Tradition: Truth, Fiction and Poetic Craft. Douglas Kelly. Cambridge: Brewer, 2014. Pp. xx+356.

<i>Machaut and the Medieval Apprenticeship Tradition: Truth, Fiction and Poetic Craft</i>. Douglas Kelly. Cambridge: Brewer, 2014. Pp. xx+356.

Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry by Julie Singer

writing, or the connection between description, visual evidence, and painting. Here Schöch covers eighteenth-century theories of language in Condillac, Rousseau, and others, ultimately showing that painting is a model for descriptive writing. Passages of the type described in the second section represent only one aspect of descriptive writing in this period. An entire esthétique picturale begins to emerge at the narrative level in the novels of this period:“Cet enjeu concerne l’ensemble de l’écriture descriptive , passages descriptifs inclus, mais tout particulièrement la modalité de l’écriture descriptive que j’ai choisi de désigner comme le discours descriptif” (214). As this study demonstrates, we should not consider description or narration as abstract, transhistorical practices, but rather view them within specific historical frameworks. This typology of novels will certainly form a useful basis for comparison with other novels of the period, or with descriptive practices in other periods. Boston University Gillian B. Pierce Singer, Julie. Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry. Cambridge: Brewer, 2011. ISBN 978-1-84384-272-9. Pp. 238. $99. Situated at the junction of medieval studies and disability studies, Singer’s book combines literary analysis and cultural history to offer an insightful examination of the interaction between rhetoric and medicine in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century French and Italian poetry. Singer focuses on the role of eyesight and blindness in love at a time when lyric explored—and at times, challenged—medical concepts. After presenting her project, Singer turns to the overlap of medical and poetic discourses in the love-imprint. She discusses the evolving view of the eye, which became an active participant in creating love, and demonstrates that the eyes served as a site of sex difference, with love darts or rays emanating from women’s eyes and being received by men’s.Anti-medical discourse is at the heart of the second chapter.While emphasizing Italian lyric, Singer explains that Petrarch’s justification of rhetoricians’ borrowing of medical language prepares the way for later French poets to treat blindness. The rest of the volume examines four rhetorical strategies: irony, metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche, each analyzed in a separate chapter. Singer places irony in the context of the humors and restoring balance through contraries. She defines medieval irony and outlines two main models before focusing on works by Petrarch and Jacques Bauchant. The use of medical metaphor, particularly in Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, reveals that verse may distract from pain and that form can offer a cure: Singer provides a fascinating investigation of the reflection of the narrator’s lovesickness in the fixedform poems, arguing that the lover can ultimately heal himself. Singer also considers metaphor in Christine de Pizan’s Avision Christine,Alain Chartier’s Livre de l’Espérance, and the work of Gilles le Muisit, a blind abbot. Form continues to play an important role in the chapter linking metonymy and prosthesis. Machaut’s Livre du Voir Dit takes 232 FRENCH REVIEW 87.4 Reviews 233 center stage, with Singer proposing that the lyric insertions compensate for lacks. She sees the use of ‘round’ fixed forms such as ballades, virelais, and rondeaux as supplementing the defective eye’s role in love. Ultimately, she concludes, the lyric prostheses fail because they stand out from the surrounding text instead of concealing their difference. Singer devotes her final chapter to synecdoche, concentrating on images of blindfold Fortune in French poetry. Studying works by Machaut, Charles d’Orléans, Villon, Martin Le Franc, and Pierre Michault, she uncovers the therapeutic potential of blindness itself. Singer’s work is a model of the interdisciplinarity that she sees in her texts,which intermingle poetic and medical language.There are rare inconsistencies (Michault’s title is given as both“Dance”and“Danse” aux aveugles), and occasionally, Singer provides more background information than necessary for her arguments whereas at other times—particularly for authors besides Petrarch and Machaut—I wished for greater detail. Moreover, the volume could explore further the issue of how ‘real’ the effects of rhetorical remedies are. Those minor quibbles notwithstanding, Singer’s innovative approach raises important questions about lyric’s power, inviting us to view blindness...

Le Livre dou Voir Dit de Guillaume de Machaut et la transition de la tradition orale vers la tradition écrite en musique

Since the middle of the twentieth century, musicologists attempted to understand when and how medieval music shifted from an oral tradition to a written one. On this question Gregorian chant was the first repertoire to which they turned their attention. Beginning in the 1990s, some musicologists attempted to show that the art of memory was also the framework of the polyphony of Notre-Dame, of Guillaume de Machaut, even of that of certain fifteenth-century repertoires, which should hitherto be fundamentally considered as products of oral composition. The great majority of these studies pertain to musical analysis. However, there witnesses to the textuality of music also exist that have been neglected. One of these is the Livre dou Voir Dit by Guillaume de Machaut, in which Guillaume gives us insights into the role of music notation in his compositional and authorial process. The analysis of this source demonstrates how careful we should be to take into account historical witnesses when considering the orality and textuality of medieval music.

Machaut’s Virtual Voir Dit and the Moment of Heidegger’s Poetry

As a counterpoint to Machaut scholarship that focuses on the materiality of the book and the professionalization of the poet in the Livre dou Voir Dit, this essay suggests that the immaterial aspects of Machaut’s work can reveal something about poets and poeticity in his time. The narrative disruption and formal interplay that are characteristic of the Voir Dit can be seen as strategies of preservation, and offer glimpses of a virtual book that would safeguard the author’s work against the ravages of time, which the material book will not escape. This article draws on Heidegger to examine the play of temporality in Machaut’s Voir Dit, specifically as temporality comes to bear on the material and the virtual. Machaut’s use of the virtual brings together two threads of Heideggerian thought: the Augenblick and the role of the poet. It is through a reading of Machaut’s virtual book that I bring together these two threads in an effort to see how the blink of an eye — whether the Augenblick or the flashes of Machaut’s virtual book — can project a poet and his work into continuous futurity.

Élucidation et glose d'un passage énigmatique du Voir Dit de Guillaume de Machaut

Verses&#160;2038&#8211;2043&#160;of Guillaume de Machaut&#8217;s Voir Dit (in P. Imbs&#8217; edition) complete the portrait of Toute Belle with a disconcerting &#8220;object&#8221;&#160;: an herminette (small ermine), to which is attached a little chain and a magnificent ring. This article aims to show that this is not the fur of a small dead ermine, but a small ermine that is very much alive, on a leash (the little chain) and with a collar (the ring), Toute Belle&#8217;s pet animal. This is her double. Machaut makes this clear by establishing a physical proximity between the two (the lady holds the small ermine), which he reinforces with onomastic proximity&#160;: Toute Belle is an anagram of ou Bellette (&#8220;or Weasel&#8221;). The zoological characteristics of weasels and stoats (who change their &#8220;dress&#8221; in winter), the myths that went around about them, linked to the lady&#8217;s own characteristics and the grievances done to her, clarify her love affair with the Poet and encourage us to look on her less severely and more courteously.

The Glorified Woman: Abstraction and Domination in Le Livre du voir dit

Pour que je puisse dire: cette femme, il faut que d'une maniere ou d'une autre je lui retire sa realite d'os et de chair, la rende absente et l'aneantisse. Le mot me donne l'etre, mais il me donne prive d'etre. --Maurice Blanchot, La Part du feu On the surface, Guillaume de Machaut's Le Livre du voir dit (1362-65) is the transcription and description of an actual love affair supposedly occurring between Machaut anda beautiful young noblewoman whom he calls Toute Belle. Machaut's self-stated goal as author is to be as inclusive as possible in order to render a truthful account of what happened between the lovers, providing the reader with, as Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet puts it: tout: le noir et blanc, l'amour et desamour (Introduction 21). To this end, Le Livre du voir dit is a sprawling, polyphonic collection of reproduced letters and verse supposedly written between Machaut and the noblewoman in real life and then transcribed in the Voir dit, where a narrative supplied by Machaut accompanies the transcriptions. The reader follows along as the purely epistolary relationship becomes a physical one. After some tensions caused by the rarity of actual visits and by rumors of infidelity, the lovers are ultimately portrayed as having achieved an ideal courtly union. Ostensibly, then, the Voir dit (True Poem) is merely the faithful transcription of what happened between two real-life lovers. However, as Blanchot reminds us, reality cannot be transcribed into language without violence. In the case of the Voir dit, this violence is exacerbated (and highlighted) because the discourse of the text--that of medieval courtly verse--is innately infused with ah ideology (that of fin'amors) according to which Guillaume must be cast as the valiant, unwavering lover and Toute Belle--as indicated by the name--must incarnate pure beauty (along with other traits of purity). Numerous studies have demonstrated to what extent the medieval cleric, as writer, could betray a desire to create for himself, among his secular peers, an impressive persona through literature, this has been shown to be the case for Richard de Fournival, (1) Abelard, (2) and, as Kevin Brownlee and Deborah McGrady suggest, for Guillaume de Machaut himself. (3) So we should not be surprised if Guillaume's (4) lofty verse and exahed descriptions of the love affair tend to paint a rather glorious and even allegorical portrait of Machaut in the guise of giving a truthful account. However, when we consider the consequences of this glorification for the called Toute Belle, who must also have an allegorical other imposed upon her, we start to glimpse an economy of domination that underlies Guillaume's retelling of the love affair. Tapping into that economy and describing it will allow us to move beyond limitations of previous scholarship concerning the Voir dit, limitations that--while discerning ulterior motives in Machaut's depiction of the love affair (i.e., building his own image)--have ignored the violence done to the the text must sacrifice to realize those motives. In Controlling Readers, McGrady has pointed to the largely ignored role (46) of Guillaume's inscribed audience in the Voir dit--invasive in terms of its capacity to disrupt and alter the course of Guillaume's literary project. She includes Toute Belle in this audience. However, such an invasive presence is more accurately described as coming from the marginal voice of the behind the construct of Toute Belle; we must distinguish between the two, because Toute Belle is perfectly congruent and necessary to Guillaume's literary project and therefore incapable of being invasive. Guillaume would write the perfect at the expense of the authentic, imperfect we glimpse in the margins of the Voir dit. It should be emphasized here that by authentic woman I do not refer to someone having existed outside of the text (this paper does not participate in that debate). …

Toward a transhuman model of medieval disability

To elaborate an understanding of medieval humanity rooted in the body, we must consider a broad class of ‘bodies’ beyond the physical. Applying the methodologies of disability studies to textual corpora offers new ways to reflect on the boundaries of the human in medieval literature. The dits, generically mixed texts, may thus be read as a corpus generated from a posthuman blending of textual elements; the prevalence of disabled narrators in the dits compounds their play with the margins of humanity. This essay proposes a ‘transhuman’ model of medieval disability, an elastic and non-binary paradigm of corporeal difference. According to this transhuman model, disability in medieval texts can represent an enhancement, a constructive alteration of the human state. A brief reading of lyric ‘insertions’ in Guillaume de Machaut's Livre du Voir Dit suggests the concept of textual prosthesis as a productive point of contact between Disability Studies and the posthuman.

What's in a Name?: Machaut, Deschamps, Peronne, and the Uses of Women for Writers in Fourteenth Century France

Guillaume de Machaut's Voir Dit (c. 1364) stages a young woman's poetic apprenticeship and quotes poems and letters said to have been written by her. Although works by Machaut's contemporary Deschamps identify this woman as a certain Peronne, her status as an historical figure remains problematic. This essay revisits the passages in which Machaut and Deschamps name Peronne, and shows that such moments of naming provide the male poet with an occasion to define and name himself, establishing his identity in counterpoint to that of the woman he addresses. Although information about Peronne remains elusive, Machaut's and Deschamps' use of her in their texts testifies both to the importance they accorded to women's amateur literary activity, and to the trepidation with which they sometimes regarded it.

Machaut's peer, Thomas Paien

ABSTRACTOne of the texts of Machaut's double balade, Quant Theseus/Ne quier (B34) is ascribed in Machaut's Voir dit to a certain Thomas Paien. The present article suggests that this Thomas was one of Machaut's peers, being like him a canon of Reims and a court secretary. Figures with similar names (and the pervasive idea that a character cited in a work of fiction might not be a real person at all) have confused earlier attempts at identification. A possible occasion for the composition of B34's texts – also involving a balade on the same refrain by Jehan Froissart – can be found in a shared patron–client link between Machaut and Thomas, both of whom had associations with John, Duke of Berry.

Fortune la contrefaite: L'Envers de l'ecriture medievale

In this book Attwood discusses the portrayal of Fortune as a figure of literary inspiration and creation in late medieval French literature, with some reference to Italian and British authors (Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch; Chaucer, Oton de Grandson, James I of Scotland). The book takes a thematic approach, rather than one based on the characterization of individual texts or authors through sustained close readings. However, certain authors do naturally receive more attention than others, resulting in more in-depth analysis of their corpora. Christine de Pizan is among the most important authors in the study, along with Machaut, Jean Regnier, Chartier and Charles d'Orléans. Jean de Meun, Villon, Froissart, Olivier de la Marche and of course key Latin writers such as Alain de Lille and Boethius also figure prominently. The book begins with a comparison of Fortune and Nature as tutelary figures presiding over literary creation. As Attwood points out, the ‘book of nature’ is timeless and descriptive, while Nature's gifts are focused on principles of form; Fortune, associated with deformation and dialectic, ‘authors’ the diachronic, ever-changing ‘book’ of historical events. Moving on to comparisons of Fortune with Love, and of Fortune with Misfortune, Attwood points out that Fortune shares with Love the qualities of being blind, capricious and variable; but the inconstance and moodiness of Fortune—and in particular the tribulations and melancholy brought on by Misfortune—are potent sources of poetic inspiration for late medieval authors. It is in the fourth chapter that the study really comes into its own, with some very interesting comparisons of Fortune and the authorial persona in the works of Christine de Pizan and Guillaume de Machaut; particular attention is given to the Mutacion de Fortune and the Voir Dit. The femininity of Fortune, for example, fosters identification with the capricious female love object; but Machaut also exploits identification between Fortune and the emasculated, weepy, semi-blind lover-narrator of the Voir Dit. Christine, for her part, exploits the theme of variability, metamorphosis and disguise to elaborate an image of the author as a de-feminised figure of both grief and fortitude, hiding her true self beneath poetic fictions just as deeper meaning lies hidden in the metaphors and allegories of poetry. Through these complex moves, both Machaut and Christine develop a kind of androgynous or hermaphroditic writing that is the very expression of the paradoxical and oxymoronic goddess Fortuna. Attwood builds on these insights in her final chapter, exploring the bi-partite, complementary and adversarial nature of so much late medieval poetry, from the complainte-confort structure of many dits amoureux, to the plethora of debate poems on all manner of topics. Fortune in her duality ultimately emerges as a figure both for the ‘écriture double’ of the late medieval author and for the author him or herself as one capable of comprising and orchestrating these diverse and mutually contradictory perspectives.

Controlling Readers: Guillaume de Machaut and his Late Medieval Audience

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.

Love, Hope, and the Nature of Merci in Machaut's Musical Balades Esperance (B13) and Je ne cuit pas (B14)

Esperance qui masseure (B13) and Je ne cuit pas quonques a creature (B14), copied adjacently in the music section of the Machaut manuscripts, are musically paired: Wulf Arlt has termed them sister balades. (1) This pairing makes meaningful their many contrasts, in particular the very different musical and poetic functions of their refrains. Arlt's musico-textual approach will here be combined with Sylvia Huot's analysis of Machaut's book as a scribal-authorial collection in which manuscript order creates additional meanings. (2) One effect of Machaut's control over Iris works is the use of ordering to promote relationships between adjacent lyrics. In his collected lyrics without music, the Loange des dames, poems linked by a combination of adjacency and shared lexis, rhymes, and/or versification create the illusion of a background narrative supporting the lyric moments. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet has drawn attention to the auto-intertextuality relating items from the Loange and the Voir Dit. (3) Arguably, such a technique can be seen throughout Machaut's oeuvre. In the poems of the music section such proto-narrative sequences have an additional level of signification--the music--which can link seemingly dissimilar poetic texts. Musical structure offers a performative punctuation which can highlight or upset the poetic verse structure of a poem, subverting poetic meanings, playing games with versification, and re-weighting semantic elements. Careful placement of musical cadences (closural articulations) can emphasize specific words; melismas (singing many notes to one syllable) can prolong vowel sounds, emphasizing rhymes. This musical poetry takes place in time, its delivery authorially controlled and manipulated. As well as treating the pair B13/B14 in their immediate context in the music balade section, I will discuss B14's duplication within a sequence of poems in the Loange. The relationship between B14's sung and unsung contexts elucidates a theme central to Machaut's courtly discourse: the role of merci within the dialectically related poetics of Esperance and Desirs. Esperance in the Sequence of the Music Balades In relation to his lady, the lover of Esperance (B13) is little better off than the unhappy lovers who dominate most of the music balades that precede B13 in the collected works manuscripts. (4) The lady's beauty has attracted the lover and he awaits her merci. However, the very presence of Esperance verbally at the beginning of the song makes all the difference to the lover's emotional experience of his situation (see figure 1). Unlike the generally suffering amants who pervade the first twelve music balades, B13's je is reassured by Hope, and does not grieve, even if the waiting is hard, since he has hope of reward without equal. The balades preceding B13 in the music section culminate in the self-conscious poet's je of Pour ce que tous (B12), who threatens to stop composing and singing songs. His refrain asserts that no one can blame him se je chant mains que ne sueil. His audience complains because his songs are sorrowful, but this, he explains, reflects nothing other than his own authentic lover's sentement upon which his lady's lack of reciprocal love has had a deleterious effect. B12's refrain rhyme, -eil, new in the context of the music balades, is the a-rhyme of B13, whose lady similarly has not reciprocated, but where the presence of Esperance reconfigures as joy B12's sorrow. For Kevin Brownlee, B13 articulates the classic Machauldian topos: for the loving self, Hope (Esperance) transforms loving into a self-sufficient state which does not depend on actual erotic fulfillment; thus awaiting the Lady's favors becomes an end in itself. (5) This feature of Machaut's courtly doctrine is central to Machaut's negotiation of the tension between his social status as poet and his poetic persona as je-lover: socially debarred from being a successful courtly lover, he makes poetic capital of his necessary lack of amorous success. …

Guillaume de Machaut: Notation and the Compositional Process

En recientes estudios se ha enfatizado cada vez más que Machaut, particularmente en sus últimas chansons profanas, desarrolló un nuevo ideal de verticalidad musical, basado concretamente en tres, en lugar de dos voces. El presente artículo relaciona esta innovación con el concepto de notación estratificada del compositor y con la individualidad lineal de cada una de las tres voces, como se pone de manifiesto por su uso de motivos rítmicos repetidos en las baladas del poema narrativo tardío, Le voir dit.

Le Livre du Voir Dit (Le Dit veridique) (review)

It is a pleasure to herald the recent publication of Paul Imbs' critical edition of the Voir Dit, perhaps the greatest work of the French fourteenth century and certainly one of the masterpieces of the vernacular literature of the European Middle Ages. The edition, which Imbs did not live to see published, appears now in the distinguished Lettres Gothiques series, introduced and fully revised by Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet. The paperback volume thus constitutes the sole critical edition of Guillaume de Machaut's most famous work, which was first published in the willfully "non-scientific" and "non-philological" form given to it by Paulin Paris in his 1875 edition, 1 [End Page 830] and which has since appeared, in Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's diplomatic edition of one manuscript (BN fr 1584, fols. 221-306), in Middle French and English in the Garland Library of Medieval Literature. 2 As such, the "Livre de Poche" under consideration here represents the very work that, according to Ernst Hoepffner's original and unrealised plan for the publication of Machaut's works, was to have appeared as the fourth volume of his Œuvres de Guillaume de Machaut. 3 It offers the reader a faithful edition of the text of a good fourteenth-century manuscript (BN fr 22545), lightly corrected when necessary, and accompanied by footnotes that signal variants found in the other principal manuscripts of the work. The text of the Dit appears here with an excellent translation into modern French, an exhaustive index of proper names, and an extensive glossary.

The Text Recontextualized in Performance: Deschamps' Prelection of Machaut's Voir Dit to the Count of Flanders

"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.

Le Voir Dit: a reconstruction and a guide for musicians

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.

Le Voir Dit and La Messe de Nostre Dame: aspects of genre and style in late works of MacHaut

Le Voir Dit is one of the most fascinating of the works left by the celebrated poet-composer Guillaume de Machaut (d. 1377), and at the same time, as John Stevens has said, ‘one of the most curious documents of the [fourteenth] century’. Through 9000 lines of narrative, sixty-two lyrics in all the main forms (nine of them set to music), and forty-six letters which include comments on the character of the songs and on the business of producing poetry, music and manuscripts, we seem to take a guided tour of Machaut's emotional and professional life over three years of his old age. For more than a century it has proved a rich source of revealing quotations, sustaining many varied arguments. The story it tells of Machaut's literary and emotional affair with a young girl, Peronne, has been read at times as autobiography, at times as fiction; and the incidental comments on composition, performance and copying have been interpreted in studies ranging far beyond Le Voir Dit as evidence of fourteenth-century professional practice. None the less, the constituent parts of the text as they survive in manuscripts from Machaut's circle are disordered, the poem lacks an adequate published edition, and even its music – in size, at least, the most manageable of its components – has yet to be considered as a whole.