The Testator’s Villainy

The poetry and persona of François Villon have been subject to transcultural reinvention since the fifteenth century (and especially since the nineteenth century, among Anglo-American poets). The legend of Villon goes back to an impecunious poet–criminal who disappeared in 1463, and who both encourages and resists a historicizing interpretation of villainy through his works. This chapter reassesses the singularity of the testator persona in Le Testament Villon (c.1461–2) in his complex vilifying manoeuvres. Some of these have distinct parallels in the early sixteenth-century works of the English poet John Skelton. Yet Villon idiosyncratically instantiates poetic discourse as a para-legal means of attesting to the rigours of torture, where the villain-poet is a direct (if unreliable) witness of his own subjection to judicial punishment.