The Judge as Reader, the Reader as Judge

This chapter explores the links between reading and judgment in Machaut’s Jugement dou roy de Navarre and shows how the poem interweaves several literary genres into a vernacular “mirror for princes.” Like Dante’s Commedia and Gower’s Confessio amantis, Machaut’s poem echoes John of Salisbury’s association of reading, law, and good kingship in the Policraticus. Each poem depicts the poet’s reading skills to be under scrutiny; yet the poems also present models for contemporary rulers to become wise judges through the “reading lessons” that the poems construct.

True Colors

This chapter examines Guillaume de Machaut’s and Geoffrey Chaucer’s association of the color blue with fidelity and green with infidelity, a color scheme that derives from contemporary heraldry. The mid- to late fourteenth century witnessed a marked surge in the number of people commissioning coats of arms; this phenomenon lead to a number of high-profile lawsuits over cases of mistaken and fraudulent armigerous identity. Chaucer himself was a witness in one of these, Scrope v. Grosvenor (1385–1391). Machaut’s and Chaucer’s use of this metaphor is read through these lawsuits to show that the two poets use heraldic color to explore issues surrounding legal identity and social reputation in their texts. Delving into the historical relationship between heraldic law and intellectual property law, the chapter further shows that both poets use these colors to figure concerns over their authorial reputations and intellectual property.

Proust and the Amorous Fountain

This chapter takes as its point of departure a curious scene in Sodom and Gomorrah in which a fountain maliciously drenches a society lady, almost raping her in the sight of a bluff, guffawing Grand Duke. Critics have long pondered the significance of the incident. So far, no one has suggested as a possible influence the title of Machaut’s La Fonteinne Amoureuse, an edition of which appeared in Paris in 1908 just as Marcel Proust was beginning work on the texts that developed into In Search of Lost Time. While this hypothesis cannot be proved beyond all doubt, one cannot fail to be struck by a number of similarities between the Proust and Machaut texts: both feature insomniac first-person narrators who produce self-fertilizing narratives displaying a high degree of reflexivity. Both narrators must overcome modest backgrounds as they seek to rise in society. The chapter suggests that Proust, intrigued by the idea of an “amorous” fountain, half-remembered and literalized it—but then occluded the fascinating source, inhibited by a complicated nexus of feelings involving his gay, half-Jewish identity, his addiction to onanism, Machaut’s occasionally anti-semitic diatribes and the rampant anti-semitism of Paris society in the Dreyfus era.

Courting Controversy?

This chapter uses Machaut’s JRB and JRN as a launch-pad for reading the relationship of response between Martin Le Franc’s Champion des dames (c.1442) and Complainte du livre du Champion des dames a maistre Martin le Franc son acteur, with the aim of understanding better the stakes at play in the fifteenth-century false retraction. The Champion references explicitly to Machaut’s judgment poems, and both the Champion and Complainte entertain an analogous interaction of metatextuality, intertextuality, and historical reference. This results in a similarly enticing and subtle interlacing of poetry and court politics. Le Franc and Machaut contribute distinctively to a characteristically late-medieval reflection on authorship as a dialogic process concerned as much with book reception as with its production.

“Le Contraire Effacies”

This chapter addresses questions of literary and political authority in the writings of two of medieval France’s best known authors, Alain Chartier (c.1385–1430) and Guillaume de Machaut (1300–1377). Chartier was steeped in a rich culture of literary, political, and intellectual debate. His literary debates are heavily inflected by Machaut’s judgment poems. Chartier and Machaut’s positioning within the tradition of the reception of their works marks them as authority figures, or “sites” of authority, and that authority is paradoxically reinforced by textual and material attempts to erase it. In Machaut's “Judgement of the King of Navarre” (1349), the personification of Discretion urges the king of Navarre, appointed judge, to “le contraire effacies” (erase the opposite, v. 3432), or in other words perhaps: to spin the debate to give the desired outcome.

Judgment at Court

This chapter examines the almost universally ignored poem, Le Tresor amoureux. This poem recounts a debate between the narrator and a squire. Although it begins as a debate about love, it moves on to topics that go well beyond that initial subject. While the poem's potential love plot remains incomplete, the essay delves into the question of judgment in debates in which final judgment is left to its readers. Moreover the essay explores the poem’s connection to Machaut judgment poems, the premise for doing so being some features the poems share; more important is the use of the love motif as a paradigm for larger issues and the role of the audience in judging and resolving those issues.

Introduction

The essays in this book take up various related aspects of Guillaume de Machaut’s legacy, especially as established by his judgment series. The salient features of that legacy include the focus on fame and authorial reputation; and, within this context, there is both the intra- and extratextual self to be contemplated, along with the emergence of an I possessing ontological fullness. The Machaldian poem manifests a shifted cultural understanding that comprehended a poetic machinery, one in which the poet (the real Guillaume) and the poet’s I (his intratextual confection) together modulate the flow of literary, social, and even political power, within the text and sometimes beyond it. The flow is most often realized through the institution of patronage. The dramatizations of the patronage system become integral within a conceptualization of authorship that is nearly modern, not so readily recognizable as medieval. In the work of Machaut and his heirs we find the problematizing of authority, the theatrics of the very notion of judgment, the late medieval dit’s capacity to leave judgment to its reader, as well as the thought-provoking ambivalence of an un-concluded jeu-parti.

Polarized Debates, Ambivalent Judgments

This chapter aims to illustrate three simple points: first, that medieval love-debate poetry is centrally concerned with a conflict between idealism and pragmatism; second, that Machaut’s Jugement du roy de Behaigne foregrounds this aspect of the love-debate genre and explores its implications; and third, that Gower’s Confessio Amantis is also structured around the juxtaposition of idealistic and pragmatic views of love. While the two narrative poems may seem to distinguish themselves from earlier love-debates by “settling” the conflict presented with a conclusive judgment, they also retain the fundamental ambivalence of the un-concluded jeux-partis. Machaut and Gower invest sympathetically in the idea that worldly pleasures, and specifically the pleasures of love, can be idealized and given enduring value, and the energy and persistence of this fantasy constitute a significant part of these poems’ appeal. It is a fantasy nonetheless, because both poets also figure the attempt to align love with virtue as essentially futile.

Bohemian Gower

The English poet John Gower has long been recognized as a Ricardian, that is, a poet in the artistic orbit of England’s King Richard II. This essay explores the importance of Richard’s Queen Anne of Bohemia as a patron in her own right and even more essential than her spouse to the special qualities of Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Anne’s pervasive presence in Gower’s English masterpiece is discovered in its engagement with the legacy of Machaut, especially his two judgment poems, Le Jugement dou roi de Behaingne and its “palinode,” Le Jugement dou roi de Navarre. These poems were dedicated (respectively) to Anne’s grandfather John of Luxembourg and (mostly likely) her aunt Bonne, the latter referenced through honorific wordplay on her name. Gower pays homage to Anne with the traditional pun on her name (in the tale of Alcestis, a figure also associated with Anne in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women), the honor paid to Bohemian culture, and most important, the prominence of good women (especially faithful wives) throughout the Confessio. The final section delves deeper into the literary strategies and ethics of love as embodied by the English poem, especially its commonalities to the defense of women in Machaut’s Navarre.

The Machaut Map

This chapter analyzes Guillaume de Machaut’s legacy as inherited by Geoffrey Chaucer and Christine de Pizan, especially in the context of a conceptualization of both Machaut the poet and his poetry as cultural capital. Machaut’s judgment poems are paired with his Le Confort d’ami and La Fonteinne amoureuse in order to establish a basis for the younger poets’ literary strategies that constitute, beyond their writings’ aesthetics, sociopolitical acts that embody intentions going beyond poetics per se. Through a discussion of a number of the younger’ poets’ works—Geoffrey’s “Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn” and the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women; and Christine’s Cent ballades d’amant et des dames, Epistre au dieu d’amours, Livre de Trois Vertus, and other writings—the chapter argues that Machaut created a scene of writing for Chaucer and Christine to enter into, thus entering a new world in which even if the status of the patron is not diminished, that of the poet is elevated through writing in both literary and political realms. The poetics of authorship as Machaut both inherited and further developed, reaches its pinnacle in the younger French poet’s work as she is seen both as poet and political thinker.