French Lyric poetry in the 14th century
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The
Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de
la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The
first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet
who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture
into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the
dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem
unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned.
Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de
Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory
with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning.
Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only
one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a
misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but
diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until
well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the
Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or
superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The
Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”),
foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and
immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of
Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important
social roles of women of all classes.
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms:
ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s
great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than
many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes
satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart,
the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose
poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid
the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for
humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political
polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy
(1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by
his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an
elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois
became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François
Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle,
a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line
octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and
events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament
(or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of
Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is
similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging.
Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to
the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque
humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an
economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely
focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de
Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the
Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances
adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches
by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To
spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view
of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled
Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony)
continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little
John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine
both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work’s realism and
psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian
court.
