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This chapter looks at the ultimate fortune of all humanity—death. Machaut's works do not just enact the symbolic lyrical deaths of male courtly lovers whose personae are clearly distinct from their author. Of a piece with his pseudo-autobiographical self-presentation, Machaut presents a more personal fear of death in some of his narrative works, especially those that date from the latter part of his life. The chapter places Machaut's ostensibly secular works within the sacred, devotional, and moral-religious contexts that both he and his audiences inhabited. It integrates the role of music within the discussion of commemoration, including the commemoration of Machaut's own death, for which Eustache Deschamps wrote two balades, which were set to music by the contemporary composer F. Andrieu. The chapter ends with an examination of Machaut's immediate afterlife, reception, and ultimate neglect, bringing the narrative chronologically full circle to the point of his scholarly resurrection outlined in the second chapter.

This chapter reviews the surprisingly meager documentary evidence about Guillaume de Machaut's life. It attempts to satisfy two basic questions: What survives, and what does it tell us? The paper trail—actually primarily a “skin trail,” since most of it is on parchment—comprises two main groups of sources. The first group includes discursive, literary writings, principally deluxe manuscripts of Machaut's own works, but also poetic treatises and literature by his contemporaries. The second encompasses various kinds of archival evidence, most pertaining to monetary aspects of Machaut's life such as employment, patronage, taxation, and the receipt of gifts. The chapter begins by describing both kinds of surviving material traces, starting, albeit briefly, with the manuscripts of Machaut's work. It then turns to the more factual documents which outline the current state of documented knowledge about Machaut's life while acknowledging that even factual documentation requires a degree of contextual interpretation. The chapter shows that far less is known about Machaut as a historical figure than most other studies have claimed.

This chapter sketches the historiography of Machaut's rediscovery in the modern period, with the intent of positioning his oeuvre within the frameworks of each discipline's historically contingent interpretations. The varied ways in which Machaut's works have been rediscovered, the aspects of them that have been points of focus, and their shifting evaluation and critical treatment betray a number of agendas that belong more to the modern scholarly community than to Machaut himself. Charting these agendas can help strip away the sometimes partisan concerns of the different branches of the modern academy; if this cannot ultimately reveal a pristine, authentically medieval Machaut, it can at least help form a more rounded picture of a figure who is, in our terms, toweringly interdisciplinary.

This chapter begins with the question: Why did Guillaume de Machaut write so many monophonic virelais? Of the thirty-three virelais, twenty-five are monophonic, while only eight are polyphonic (seven for two voices, one for three voices); even not counting these polyphonic virelais, the twenty-five monophonic virelais constitute the second most numerous genre in his musical oeuvre. The chapter examines the expressive meaning of both monophony and the virelai form, which is the only forme fixe to feature a substantial refrain, in the context of the Remede de Fortune, the Voir Dit, and his “collected works” manuscripts; and it considers their possible genealogical ties to Occitan dansas and their relationship to Machaut’s other monophonic—and decidedly archaic—genre, the lai. Furthermore, a series of Machaut’s lais alternate male and female voices, and a few but significant examples of his virelais follow suit. As both nostalgic and new, the monophonic virelai participates in Machaut’s programmatic exploration of the expressive lyric voice that also involves an exploration of the gendered voice.

This chapter analyzes a related central plank in Machaut's doctrine of courtly love: Hope. One of the most compact statements of the power of Hope to be found in Machaut's works occurs in a balade that appears only in the music section of his works: Esperance (B13). The balades preceding B13 in the music section culminate in Pour ce que tous (B12), whose self-conscious singer threatens to stop composing and singing songs, asserting repeatedly, “Je chant mains que ne sueil” (I sing less than I used to). B13 cures and cancels the despair of B12 with the introduction of the figure that forms its opening word: “Esperance” (Hope). The situation with respect to the lady remains unchanged: the lady of B13 similarly has not reciprocated, but the presence of Hope reconfigures the sorrow of B12 as joy and enables the composition and singing of balades (as well as the copying and reading of them) to continue.

Some of the blame for the too easy mapping of fictional truth onto historical reality that derives from what we know about Machaut can be attributed to the mischievous manipulation of personal truth by the man himself. This chapter considers Machaut's presentation of his authorial persona by examining the Prologue to his works. This poem outlines a poetics within which Machaut's status as a poet and—perhaps more surprisingly, given the Prologue's lack of musical notation—a musician are central. In addition, the Prologue's paired images emphasize the wholeness of Machaut's book and the importance of making connections between its parts, leading the reader to appreciate a poetics that is as scribal as it is musical. The chapter goes on to explore the way in which Machaut linked his art, life, and truth through his own particular take on the necessity of composing in line with one's own sentement (emotional authenticity).

Hope is central to Machaut's courtly doctrine, since it enables the lover to operate at a level of self-sufficiency whatever might be happening in the world outside his own imagination. Hope is presented as the “remede de Fortune,” the remedy for mischance, the cure for ill luck. In Machaut's works Fortune is always a negative force, in whose power the desiring subject lies unless mental efforts in forging a primary relationship with Hope place him or her beyond it. Machaut's Fortune is modeled after the traditional representation of the goddess, drawing largely on the pagan version impersonated by Lady Philosophy in Boethius' Consolation, book 2. Following the imprecations of Hope in the Remede, this chapter seeks to understand the workings of Fortune through an examination of several of her multiple presentations in Machaut's music and poetry.

This explores how playful citational exchange animates Machaut's great mature work of the early 1360s, Le Livre dou Voir Dit. Here citational engagement in lyric exchanges orchestrates the burgeoning love affair between the poet-narrator and his young admirer at the center of the plot. It also is at the heart of a more “professional” lyric skirmish with one of the author's real-life associates, Thomas Paien. The chapter concludes by exploring a network of interrelated lyrics and songs that were apparently spawned by Machaut's contribution to the latter (Quant Theseus / Ne quier veoir, Ballade 34). It is suggested that some of this collection of interrelated works might have been staged at an informal puy, perhaps for Jehan, duke of Berry. This case study offers a glimpse of the artistic milieu within which the poet-composer operated. It also offers insights into how his peers—and, possibly, his patrons—engaged with, and responded to, his compositions.

Part Three is devoted to citational practice in Machaut's lyrics and songs. Chapter Eight traces the sources for his borrowings and reveals that he plumbed material from both peers and predecessors. His engagement with Jehan de Le Mote is reflected in some of his earliest ballades and these cases potentially hold valuable information about the dating of Machaut's earliest polyphonic songs; it is argued here that Machaut was quoting his peer rather than the reverse, suggesting his earliest polyphonic ballades were written after 1339. Other of Machaut's appropriations show that trouvère songs were still alive in the lyric imagination of the poet-composer and his audience; Machaut quoted music and text from songs known to us from Oxford Bodleian, MS Douce 308, and we encounter, too, textual reminiscences of songs by the Chastelain de Couci. In addition to such targeted citations, Machaut's lyrics abound with familiar refrains, proverbs and other commonplaces. This demonstrates that, for all their novelty, his lyrics and songs display strong elements of continuity with the earlier vernacular tradition.

This chapter turns to another little studied contemporary of Machaut, Jehan de Le Mote, who, like Watriquet de Couvin, hailed from Hainaut but pursued his career in Paris. His lyrics, which survive without music, provide direct comparison with Machaut's and offer important insights into how the ballade form had evolved by ca. 1340 when Machaut likely started composing his own examples. His surviving lyrics reveal that citation was a key element of the ballade in its up-to-date guise. Le Mote was celebrated as one of the leading composers of the day, along with Machaut and Philippe de Vitry, with whom he enjoyed ongoing lyric exchanges. Some citations uncovered in two anonymous musical works, a motet and a chanson, permit a new assessment of Le Mote's significance as a composer and offer some rare glimpses into the kind of music he probably wrote.

This chapter presents an analysis of Guillaume de Machaut’s balade De petit po (B18). Taking an understanding of medieval counterpoint as its starting point, the analysis treats the two central contrapuntal voices first before examining the response to these voices provided variously by the (mutually exclusive) triplum and contratenor parts. Ultimately the analysis inflects a consideration of the balade’s performance contexts, which serve as a means of simultaneously presenting and commentating on its verbal text.

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.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to reflect on the centrality of music within Guillaume de Machaut's poetry and poetics by integrating discussion of his songs into a thematic treatment of his works. As a man who was at once a secretary, poet, and musician, Machaut is important in historical, literary, and musical terms. But these kinds of importance represent three discrete faculties in the modern university, so the modern divisions of scholarship serve Machaut's highly integrated output badly. The book attempts to reintegrate the various strands of scholarly treatment in order to present a more complete picture of Machaut as a creative artist. In particular it is designed to bring the discussion of the musical works more centrally into a consideration of Machaut's poetic themes, to show that music functions variously to enshrine and transform them. An overview of the subsequent is also presented.

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.

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.

Machaut's fixed-form lyrics feature a multitude of recurrences: recurrent phrases and even whole lines litter his song-texts and unnotated lyrics. This chapter explores how Machaut exploited the art of self-citation in his collection of unnotated lyrics known as La Loange des dames: here Machaut became his own authority in the art of love-through-lyric. Case studies illustrate how he replicated material to construct new lyrics and to create interrelated pairs or even intertextual sequences of works. Recent scholarship has explored ordering in medieval anthologies, and interpretations of Machaut's lyric output have been strongly influenced by prevailing ideas regarding the author's self-conscious desire to guide his readers through his written oeuvre; it is argued here that the patterns of citational play in La Loange des dames suggest he was happy for its lyrics to be savored individually or in small, interrelated groups.

This argues that “grafted song” enlightens us about attitudes to authorship and canonicity in this age of self-conscious new departures; poets and composers like Machaut were keen to stress their authorial identity but also to align themselves with past traditions and predecessors and to situate themselves in relation to their peers. Although, surprisingly, Machaut's lyrics and songs did not circulate in great number outside the complete-works manuscripts, his renown can be gauged by their reception. Certain of his own works became the subject of borrowings by his younger contemporaries and immediate successors in France, the north, and in Italy. Just as formalized lyric exchanges and the compilation of lyric cycles grew popular among poets, the post-Machaut generation of song-writers, including those of Ars subtilior, continued the tradition of citational engagement within the chanson, even as they endeavored to extend the boundaries of musical style.