In close readings of a wide range of texts significant during their own time but little studied today, the author presents a new view of late medieval French poetry in all its subtle variety: its quirkiness, its sumptuous and acrobatic rhyming, its frequent moral seriousness, its occasional bawdiness, and the ambiguities of its authorial 'I'. The book is centered on the rich metaphor of poetry as play - a joyous activity, a game in which both the poet and the public may be players. The number of word games is legion, and the late medieval poets play different kinds involving puns, rhymes, riddles, sexual jokes, irony, and ambiguity. Sometimes the game is blindman's buff, where the poet's identity is hidden, changed, multiplied. Some poems are farces or high comedy; others are morality plays, in which the poet casts himself as a player. Identifying the role played by the poet, the place of his or her 'I' in its various embodiments, is a major concern in the reading of the texts. Guillaume de Machaut serves as the first player of the poetic game and, particularly in his ballades, as a kind of magister ludi, who is the source of the rules. The foremost poet of the fourteenth century, Machaut exemplified for the next century the force of authority and tradition. Christine de Pizan inventively interprets the rules in her play with persona and with the courtly conventions of formal verse like the rondeau. In the freer forms of Alain Chartier's first-person dits, one can explore a poetics in which neither intellectual nor psychological nor metaphorical originality, as we understand it today, appears central to the poet's craft. Through a reading of Jean Meschinot's Lunettes des Princes, the author confronts the problem posed by the lengthy moral didactic poems so characteristic of the age: can they be read as 'poetry' in any modern sense? Jean Molinet is the center of an essay that looks at the considerable body of obscure verse, almost entirely neglected by modern scholarship, that was written during the era. the author confronts the questions this verse raises regarding its relation both to the society that produced it and to other, more decorous poetry.<

Book Information
ISBN 9780804718288
Author Leonard W. Johnson
Format Hardback
Page Count 372
Imprint Stanford University Press
Publisher Stanford University Press