SOURCE: Olson, Glending. “Deschamps' Art de dictier and Chaucer's Literary Environment.” Speculum 48, no. 4 (October 1973): 714-723.

[In the following essay, Olson examines the views on poetry expressed in L'Art de dictier and explores their possible influence on Chaucer.]

Written in 1392, Eustache Deschamps' L'Art de dictier et de fere chançons, balades, virelais et rondeaulx defines lyric poetry as a species of music and describes, with examples, the formal requirements of various lyric types.¹ Perhaps because it is so much a manual and so little a theoretical examination of poetry, its ideas and implications, and their significance for contemporaries like Chaucer, have not been fully appreciated. Yet it is perhaps the only critical document we have from a poet whose connections with Chaucer, both literary and personal, are demonstrable; and it is therefore important to attend to whatever attitudes toward poetry it reveals. The purpose of this essay is to define some of those attitudes, to root them in a poetic tradition, and to suggest their relevance to understanding Chaucer's literary environment. As I hope to show, they reveal ways of thinking about some poetry which differ from the familiar didactic and allegorical formulations of many medieval and modern commentators.

I

The Art de dictier begins with a brief discussion of each of the seven liberal arts. The summaries are fairly conventional, though perhaps, as one critic has argued, focusing more on practical application than earlier treatments.² Certainly Deschamps' analysis of music, the last of the seven, differs a good deal in emphasis from the traditional medieval discussions of that art. Since he categorizes lyric poetry as music, his statements here are crucial:

Musique est la derreniere science ainsis comme la medicine des .vii. ars; car quant le couraige et l'esperit des creatures ententives aux autres ars dessus declairez sont lassez et ennuyez de leurs labours, musique, par la douçour de sa science et la melodie de sa voix, leur chante … tant que par sa melodie delectable les cuers et esperis de ceuls qui auxdiz ars, par pensée, ymaginaison et labours de bras estoient traveilliez, pesans et ennuiez, sont medicinez et recreez, et plus habiles après a estudier et labourer aux autres .vi. ars dessus nommez.

(269)

The analogy between the function of music and that of medicine appears also in one of Deschamps' balades, on the mechanical and liberal arts:

Et Musique est le doulz assentement
De sons, de voix; medicine approuvée,
De ces.vii. ars est l'assouagement. …

(23)

Boethius, Cassiodorus, and earlier writers on music acknowledged its therapeutic value but did not make that the primary attribute of the art.³ The traditional definition of music involves a much broader vision and stems from Boethius' statements in De musica, which divide music into three categories: mundana, the harmonic nature of the universe; humana, the corresponding harmony in the faculties of man; and instrumentalis, those sounds made by man, either through voice or instruments, which imitate the more important harmonies. This is the conception of music which becomes standard throughout the Middle Ages in philosophical discussions of the art.⁴

One can also find, however, a tendency in the later Middle Ages to deal with music more on the basis of audible sound, and as a somewhat self-contained art, than with reference to the moral and philosophical implications of harmony and proportion,⁵ and this appears to be the direction of Deschamps' definition. Instead of treating music as part of the quadrivium, as is usual, he separates it completely from the other six liberal arts. They are the subjects one studies laboriously in order to be well educated; music is the means by which that study is facilitated. The definition does not speak of musica mundana or humana nor claim that the study of music teaches one anything about the nature of God's creation. Music seems to be simply the sounds one hears, and Deschamps emphasizes its purely pleasurable aspects: its “douçour,” its “delectable” melody, and the “chans delectables et plaisans” (269) it produces. Music of course is useful and performs a needed function; in that sense it may be related to certain aspects of musica humana which are concerned with the proper disposition of elements in the body and the harmony between body and soul.⁶ Yet Deschamps does not really deal with it in moral or philosophical terms but in practical ones, the assuaging of man's weariness so that he may subsequently return to the study of the other arts. The analogy to medicine reinforces the pragmatic nature of music, for Hugh of St. Victor classifies medicine as a mechanical art, a science which is useful to man but which does not entail philosophical inquiry into causes.⁷ More than a century before, the Image du Monde had also compared the function of music to that of medicine, for (in Caxton's translation) “as musyque accordeth alle thinges that dyscorde in them … in lyke wyse trauaylleth phisyque to brynge Nature to poynt that disnatureth in mannes body.” But it goes on to distinguish between medicine, which is a “crafte that entendeth to the helthe of mannes body,” and the liberal art of music, which “serueth to the soule” and leads one to know “the accordance of alle thinges.”⁸ The Art de dictier does not make that distinction because it does not associate music with the contemplation of universal proportion but with the psychological purpose of refreshing men.

Having defined music, Deschamps divides it into two categories: “… nous avons deux musiques, dont l'une est artificiele et l'autre est naturele” (269). Artificial music is that which even “le plus rude homme du monde” can learn, for singing or playing an instrument is based on the musical notes, and one can teach the rules for their use.

L'autre musique est appellée naturele pour ce qu'elle ne puet estre aprinse a nul, se son propre couraige naturelment ne s'i applique, et est une musique de bouche en proferant paroules metrifiées, aucunefoiz en laiz, autrefoiz en balades, autrefoiz en rondeaulx. …

(270)

Although the classification of forms of lyric poetry under music may seem unusual, Deschamps had precedent for it in theory as well as in the fact that lyric poetry in the troubadour tradition was sung. John of Garland's classification of musica instrumentalis includes poetry, and he is quite explicit about it in the last part of his Poetria: “Rithmica species est artis enim musice.”⁹ As far back as Boethius, too, at least some forms of poetry come under the heading of music, for in his enumeration of kinds of musicians one of the less admirable types is “genus poetarum, quod non potius speculatione ac ratione quam naturali instinctu fertur ad carmen.”¹⁰ Previous theory and practice, however, usually dealt with poetry that was sung. Deschamps stresses that musique naturele comes “par voix non pas chantable” from “faiseurs” who cannot compose “par art de notes” (271). This breaks with the troubadour convention of lyric poetry set to music and with Guillaume de Machaut's practice of writing music and lyrics, and it would appear that the treatise is in part an effort to have spoken verse accorded the same recognition as the best-known poetry before him.¹¹ Deschamps notes the close relationship between artificial and natural music, explaining that songs are “anobliz” by words just as lyrics are “embellies” by melody (271). But he insists that each is “plaisant a ouir par soy,” and even suggests that natural music can be used in places where artificial music would not be appropriate, as in the case of one who might “lire aucun livre de ces choses plaisans devant un malade” (272). This example reinforces the idea of the therapeutic value of music presented at the beginning of the treatise.

Two remaining aspects of natural music will help to illuminate the literary theory implicit in the Art de dictier. First is the emphasis on form rather than subject matter. Natural music is defined by its use of “paroules metrifiées” in certain fixed forms. Deschamps never specifies fully what these poems are to be about, although at one point he suggests that a major topic is “la louenge des dames” (270), and in his discussion of the serventois he says it is used for poems about the Virgin (281). Later in the treatise he offers this brief comment on two poetic types:

Item, quant est aux pastoureles et sotes chançons, elles se font de semblable taille et par la maniere que font les ballades amoureuses, excepté tant que les materes se different selon la volunté et le sentement du faiseur; et pour ce n'en faiz je point icy exemple pour briefté et pour abregier ce livret.

(287)

A reader is hardly likely, upon encountering one of Deschamps' highly coarse sotes balades, to think of it as anything like his refined love poetry. But it appears he thought the two types to be quite alike because they have the same form; the radical change in subject matter does nothing to alter the poem's defining characteristic, its balade structure. Deschamps' practice shows his adherence to these formal considerations. He writes religious, moral, and political poems, love lyrics, satires, jests and obscenities; yet despite his wide range of material the vast majority of his compositions fall within the range of the musique naturele genres discussed in the Art de dictier.¹² The single manuscript preserving his poetry distinguishes at times a ballade de moralité from a ballade amoureuse or a sote ballade, but the typical heading is solely formal, e.g. balade or autre rondel.

The Art de dictier also implies that the function of natural music is primarily pleasurable. The fact that its sweet sounds “plaisent” listeners is one of the reasons Deschamps thinks the art ought to be considered as music, and the words “plaisant” and “delectable” permeate the treatise. Pleasure as a means to relaxation and refreshment certainly justifies the theory in a solid psychological way, yet clearly this purpose is not comparable to the more exalted moral and religious functions claimed by much medieval literature and literary theory, and no mention appears anywhere of the edifying aims of musique naturele. In one of the few books on Chaucer to give any attention to the Art de dictier, Robert O. Payne comments on this lack and compares the work to Dante's De vulgari eloquentia:

His is a much thinner poetic than Dante's, both in that he takes up only one kind of poetry, and in that he has next to nothing to say about the moral commitment which for Dante gave rational consistency to the theory and affective power to the practice of poetry. But Deschamps' treatise remains an interesting example of what happens when the moral passion which had converted rhetoric to poetic weakens, while the consequent sense of regular artifice and rational discipline in poetry remains.¹³

Compared to Dante, the theory of poetry in the Art de dictier does indeed seem thin; but such a comparison is an evaluation of two different poetics, not of stronger and weaker versions of the same theory. Deschamps has formulated a view of literature which emphasizes form as a defining characteristic and the giving of pleasure as the principal function; he explains musique naturele without recourse to questions of substance. Religious subject matter is by no means excluded, of course, and the bulk of Deschamps' own work is highly moral. But he does not speak of the “moral commitment” of his lyric poetry because its aesthetic entails none. In this respect he differs considerably from most medieval literary theory, of which Dante is a representative. It tends to speak in terms of a surface discourse and an underlying idea, as is most obvious in allegorical commentary which distinguishes between cortex and nucleus and as is implicit in the arts of poetry, which speak of the need for “sana et commendabili … sententia” beneath “verborum ornata” and assert that “poesis” is used to “vestire” one's “materiam.”¹⁴ The Art de dictier, on the other hand, shows no concern about proper materia; its “art” teaches one to make “toutes manieres de balades, rondeaulx” and other lyric types (291) by delineating simply the formal configuration of each. That is the music, and its purpose is to please and refresh.

If Deschamps' attitude to lyric poetry differs from the approach to literature of Dante and allegorical theorists, it is related to the French poetic environment in which he worked. As Varty and Laurie have argued, the Art de dictier tries to ally its spoken musique naturele with the tradition of troubadour lyrics and of Machaut, which combined music and poetry. In the Prologue, an introductory work affixed to a group of his narrative poems, Machaut offers a view of lyric verse which has many of the elements we have seen in the treatise. Nature gives him “Scens, Retorique et Musique” to help him “fourmer / Nouviaus dis amoureus plaisans,” and of the last says “Musique te donra chans, / Tant que vorras, divers et deduisans.”¹⁵ Her gift, then, is song forms which will be used as structures for Machaut's lyric poetry. These are later enumerated and are to be used “A l'onneur et a la loange / De toutes dames sans losange” (6). Subsequently Machaut praises music:

Et Musique est une science
Qui vuet qu'on rie et chante et dance.
Cure n'a de merencolie
Ne d'homme qui merencolie
A chose qui ne puet valoir,
Eins met tels gens en nonchaloir.
Partout ou elle est, joie y porte;
Les desconfortez reconforte,
Et nès seulement de l'oïr
Fait elle les gens resjoïr.

(9)

He adds that music is perfect for praising God, that angels laud Him “en chantant,” and that David pleased him by harping. But although it may well be associated with religious activities, music is not discussed as an imitator of moral harmonies but as a skill which will better enable the poet to “faire chose qui bien plaise / Aus dames” (11-12), a skill primarily justified on the same grounds Deschamps cites: its capacity to refresh its listeners.

Although Deschamps' connection with the troubadours is much less direct than with Machaut, it will nevertheless be helpful to look briefly at some aspects of the Leys d'amors, the most significant of the troubadour poetic treatises.¹⁶ The art of trobar is the art of fashioning poems:

E deu hom tractar en aytals dictatz. de sen. o de lauzors. o damors. o descondig. o de maldig general. per donar castier als malvatz. o desquern. per donar solas e deport. o de planch. per gran desplazer quom ha motas vetz. E per so quar de diversas cauzas pot hom tractar en dictatz: per so foron trobat divers dictat. ayssi cum son vers. chansos. sirventes. dansas. descort. tensos. …

(8-10)

[And in such compositions one should deal with morality, or praise, or love, or argument, or general satire, in order to castigate wicked people, or jest, in order to give amusement and distraction, or complaint, in order to show the great displeasure one often has. And because one can deal with various matters in compositions, various forms have been invented, such as vers, chanson, sirventes, dansa, descort, tenson. …]

Stated here, very concisely, is a theory of poetry as an art of making. It enumerates subjects for composition and in some cases indicates the particular reasons for selecting a given topic. The range of material and intention stretches from serious questions of love and morality to the offering of entertainment. For each subject a particular form exists, and the treatise deals with each type of lyric verse not only structurally but also—and this is what Deschamps fails to do—in terms of its proper content. Thus the vers “deu tractar de sen” (338), the chansos “deu tractar principalmen damors. o de lauzors” (340), the pastorela “deu tractar desquern. per donar solas” (346).¹⁷

The Leys d'amors also deals with the “cauzas” which prompted the creation of the art:

Esta sciensa foc atrobada per so que quascus dictatz sia mays agradans. e mays plazens. per los rims sonans. consonans. e leonismes. e cascus miels e plus tost puesca reportar cascun dictat. per so recitan e legen hom sen deporte. e bos motz entenda. et aprenda. e yssamens per ques hom per bels chans melodiozes. e plazens. se done en son coratge gaug. et alegrier. quar per gaug e per alegrier. son mant cocirier apremegut. et ysshamens quar hom porta plus leu tot trebalh. cant alqunas vetz se dona solas. e deport. quar a trebalh no fug ni falh. qui pren deport per miels suffrir trebalh.

(10)

[This art has been invented so that each composition might be more agreeable and more pleasing through its assonant, consonant, and leonine rhymes, and so that a person might be able to produce each composition more precisely and efficiently, with the result that one could delight himself by its recitation and reading, and hear and learn fine speech. Moreover, by songs melodious and pleasing one may give his spirit enjoyment and delight, and through enjoyment and delight many troubles are alleviated. Furthermore, a person bears all his work more easily when at certain times he allows himself amusement and distraction; for one does not avoid or abandon work if he accepts some distraction in order to sustain that work better.]

It enumerates other causes as well (avoidance of sloth, ability to speak concisely), but clearly the giving of pleasure is a major function of the art of trobar: rhyme makes the compositions pleasing, audiences enjoy hearing both melody and words. And the result of this kind of pleasure is that which Deschamps specifies as the effect of musique naturele: the relief of anxiety, the refreshment which enables one to return to work more easily. The Leys d'amors, in its theory of poetry as composition in fixed forms dealing with a variety of subjects and intended to please its audience, shows that the attitudes of Machaut and Deschamps belong to a tradition which goes back to troubadour verse; it articulates better than either certain values and objectives which seem constant throughout the theory of lyric poetry in fourteenth-century France.¹⁸

In summary, we may claim for Deschamps in the Art de dictier a coherent theory of lyric poetry which has obvious affiliations with the ideas of his troubadour and trouvère predecessors. According to it, musique naturele is essentially the art of setting versified lyrics into various prescribed song forms. As a complete view of literature it is clearly inadequate; but taken in conjunction with late fourteenth-century lyric practice in France and its development in England, it can be seen as the most articulate statement in Chaucer's time of a popular literary attitude substantially different from much other medieval theory. It offers intricate poetic forms used for primarily pleasurable purposes, such pleasure ultimately serving to refresh and enliven, hence to render one more able in the pursuit of serious work.¹⁹ It is a “maker's” view of poetry, for the essence of natural music is fabrication within tightly controlled formal restrictions. It seems quite suitable to a poet in Deschamps' position; for the court maker, who must write now of love, now of politics, now of his own need for money, perhaps the only aspect of his craft that can be easily defined and used as a pattern is a fixed structural form.²⁰

II

It is not necessary to argue at length here the various ways in which late fourteenth-century French poets influenced Chaucer, particularly in his early work. We also know well the high probability of personal acquaintance with a number of his French contemporaries; and Deschamps' famous balade to Chaucer appears to be in response to a request by the Englishman that he receive compositions from “ceuls qui font.”²¹ To what extent does Deschamps' view of lyric poetry bear on Chaucer's understanding of literature? There is of course no reason to suppose he ever saw the Art de dictier; but if Deschamps' ideas were part of the contemporary poetic current, as they appear to have been, Chaucer would have had difficulty avoiding them. The very existence of his short poems is testimony to his knowledge of the lyric forms advocated by Machaut and Deschamps. His favorite genres are the complaint and the balade, and within the latter form he deals with a variety of subjects which suggests something of Deschamps' range. To Rosemounde and Womanly Noblesse are clearly balades amoureuses; Truth, Gentilesse, and Lak of Stedfastnesse moral balades; the envoys to Scogan and Bukton correspond closely to some of Deschamps' occasional lyrics.²²

Moreover, Chaucer's vocabulary when talking about such poems indicates acceptance of the idea of lyric poetry as natural music. He frequently mentions various forms of the lyric mode and when grouping them together refers to them as “songs,” as in his reference in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women to the “fresshe songes” of lovers which he transcribes (F79, G67). Gower puts them in the same category: in the Confessio Amantis Venus notes that Chaucer made “songes glade” for her sake.²³ Chaucer even puns on the word once, in the Book of the Duchess, noting that the sorrowful knight “sayd a lay, a maner song, / Without noote, withoute song” (471-72). Here is a clear instance of musique naturele: the knight's “lay” has no melody, yet Chaucer still classifies it as a song. If, in accord with his French contemporaries, he regarded lyric poetry as a branch of music, it is reasonable to conclude that he gave the question of content the same place it occupies in continental theory. Although he never explicitly states his purpose in writing songs, there is no reason to suspect that he differed much from Deschamps in thinking of them primarily as products of his craft designed to give various kinds of pleasure. To assume that Chaucer's attitude was much like that of his fellow French makers accounts for the variety of subjects he treats in a relatively small number of poems. No doubt he considered the moral balades to be of much more importance than To Rosemounde or the Complaint to his Purse, and they are his most popular lyrics in terms of manuscript survival; but all of them are equally true to the nature of musique naturele. Like the practitioners mentioned in the Art de dictier, Chaucer wrote according to his “volunté et sentement,” which included the desire to produce love lyrics and humorous occasional verse as well as balades of serious moral advice.

Perhaps the most important ramification of the theory delineated in this essay has to do with the relation of the poet to his poetry. The predominant medieval view of literature usually involves the separation of form and content and evaluation of the latter on the basis of accepted moral or religious doctrine.²⁴ Thus a poet may have a good deal of latitude in his manner of presentation but not in his purpose. If one writes in the firm belief that any acceptable work of art must necessarily have sana et commendabilis sententia, then—as Payne says of Augustinian rhetoric—one's principles would not include “any choices about the content or direction of argument.”²⁵ But Deschamps says that a “faiseur” writes according to his “volunté et sentement,” and other treatises in the tradition specify a variety of forms corresponding to a variety of subject matter and purposes. “Sentement” usually has an amatory meaning in the poetics of musique naturele: it refers to the feelings of a lover which cause him to express his love in verse.²⁶ But Deschamps uses the word in a broader sense, as the contexts reveal (270-71, 287); he refers not only to motivation through love but to free choice, to one's poetic inclinations. The implied relationship between a poet and his writing is in a sense freer than the one inherent in most medieval literary theory, for a maker can choose not only his approach and his literary devices but also his very subject and direction. He is not constrained by the feeling that in order to be acceptable his literary production must offer certain kinds of wisdom; his constraints are, rather, formal; and as it works out they are no doubt social as well, in terms of what is demanded of a court maker.

This somewhat freer view of the relationship of writer to subject is probably relevant to Chaucer (and to other late medieval makers) in connection with more than lyric poetry. The attitude toward literature implied in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women seems to entail a sense of multiple influences and diverse poetic effects and intentions.²⁷ Certain narratives within the framework of the Canterbury Tales depend on a point of view which accepts poetic inclinations not valued in the moral tradition: the fabliaux meant for “game” (A3186), the literary parody that is Thopas. Chaucer's Retraction indicates quite clearly that his literary creations have not all been directed to a single Christian goal. There is no need in terms of available poetic thought in the fourteenth century to assume that even Chaucer's least serious-looking works must be didactic because he could not have thought otherwise about the function of poetry. He calls himself a “makere,” never a “poete”; and if we grant to him what Deschamps grants to the “faiseur”—the determination of one's material on the basis of one's own will, the justification of a literature which may not intend to do more than please and refresh—then we will be able to recognize both his debts to moral and allegorical attitudes and his ability to work at times within other frameworks of poetic thought.

It is too large a task here to attempt to delineate fully the fusions of one poetic tradition with another as they exist in the work of an individual who transforms them in his own ways. What I hope to have established is the existence in the late fourteenth century of a reputable attitude toward some kinds of literature which differs from the familiar medieval habit of thinking in terms of a literary surface and an underlying content. As it is articulated in the Art de dictier, it deserves to be considered as an important element in the complex of literary ideas which influenced Chaucer. We know that in many ways he works in the traditions of Alain de Lille and Dante; there is evidence as well to suggest that his understanding of poetry and its purposes has affinities with Deschamps and Dunbar. That these names are less venerable, and that the maker's theory discussed here culminates in the excesses of the grands rhétoriqueurs, ought not weigh against the attempt to understand as fully as possible the literary environment in which Chaucer wrote.

Notes

1. Oeuvres complètes de Eustache Deschamps, ed. Le Marquis de Queux de Saint-Hilaire and Gaston Raynaud (Paris, 1878-1903), vii, 266-92. Subsequent references to Deschamps in the text are to page numbers of the seventh volume.

2. Roger Dragonetti, “‘La Poesie … ceste musique naturele’: Essai d'exégèse d'un passage de l'Art de Dictier d'Eustache Deschamps,” Fin du Moyen Âge et Renaissance: Mélanges de philologie française offerts à Robert Guiette (Anvers, 1961), p. 53.

3. Dragonetti, p. 54; Rabanus Maurus, De universo, PL, cxi, 495-96, following Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, III, 17.

4. De musica, PL, lxiii, 1171. For a thorough discussion of Boethius' idea of music, with special emphasis on its moral and philosophical qualities, see David S. Chamberlain, “Philosophy of Music in the Consolatio of Boethius,” Speculum, xlv (1970), 80-97. For subsequent medieval ideas see also Edgar de Bruyne, Études d'esthétique médiévale, 3 vols. (Bruges, 1946), passim.

5. Dragonetti, pp. 54-56; William G. Waite, “Johannes de Garlandia, Poet and Musician,” Speculum, xxxv (1960), 180. De Bruyne finds this tendency as early as the twelfth century in Gundissalinus (ii, 115-17). In Music in the Middle Ages (New York, 1940), Gustave Reese notes a movement in fourteenth-century secular music “towards an art intended for connoisseurs, an art existing more for its own sake than as a servant of religion” (pp. 339-40), the impetus for which was ars nova. There was reaction against some of these secular developments—and espousal of the value of the old, “perfect” way of composing—as seen in the famous bull of Pope John XXII and in the remarks of Jacobus of Liège in his Speculum musicae, ed. de Coussemaker, Scriptorum de musica medii aevi (Paris, 1864-76), ii, 427-32. But trouvère composition in the latter portion of the fourteenth century continued to move in its own way, and one composer could even joke about his lyrics being “en contraire / De bon art qui est parfayt!” Quoted in Nigel Wilkins, “The Post-Machaut Generation of Poet-Musicians,” Nottingham Mediaeval Studies, xii (1968), 41.

6. Cf. Chamberlain, 82-83; Hugh of St Victor, Didascalicon, II, 12, ed. C. H. Buttimer (Washington, D. C., 1939).

7. Didascalicon, II, 20, 26. For Deschamps' claims to have read Hugh see Raynaud, XI, 149. The separation of music from the other six liberal arts is reminiscent of St. Bonaventura's separation of theatrics from the other six mechanical arts, which is made on the grounds that whereas they are intended “ad commodum sive profectum secundum exteriorem hominem,” theatrics alone aims at man's “solatium et delectationem.” Saint Bonaventure's de Reductione Artium ad Theologiam, trans. Sister Emma Thérèse Healy (St. Bonaventure, N.Y., 1940), p. 40.

8. Caxton's Mirrour of the World, ed. Oliver H. Prior, EETS e.s. 110 (London, 1913), pp. 38-40.

9. Ed. Giovanni Mari, I trattati medievali de ritmica latina (Milan, 1899), p. 35. Cf. Waite, 188-91. The other treatises on ars rithmica printed by Mari do not explicitly categorize it as John of Garland does, but apparently placing the art under music was one of two workable classifications. A later theorist notes that although other authorities consider it part of “musicali scientie,” he thinks it should be seen as “genus secunde rethorice scientie” (p. 97).

10. PL, lxiii, 1196. As Dragonetti observes (pp. 57-58), the fact that Deschamps sees the desire to poetize “naturelment” as a mark of distinction is further evidence of his distance from Boethius, who finds work motivated by “naturali instinctu” inferior to composition based on reason and learning.

11. Kenneth Varty, “Deschamps's Art de Dictier,” French Studies, xix (1965), 164-68; I. S. Laurie, “Deschamps and the Lyric as Natural Music,” Modern Language Review, lix (1964), 561-70.

12. See Raynaud, xi, 102; Laurie, 568-70.

13. The Key of Remembrance (New Haven, 1963), p. 55.

14. The quotations are from separate works of Geoffrey of Vinsauf, ed. E. Faral, Les Arts poétiques du XII^e et du XIII^e siècle (1924; rpt. Paris, 1962), pp. 284, 199. On the concept of cortex and nucleus, see D. W. Robertson, Jr., “Some Medieval Literary Terminology, with Special Reference to Chrétien de Troyes,” Studies in Philology, xlviii (1951), 669-92.

15. Oeuvres de Guillaume de Machaut, ed. Ernest Hoepffner (Paris, 1908-21), i, 1-2. Page references in the text are from the first volume.

16. Ed., with French trans., A. F. Gatien-Arnoult, Monumens de la littérature romane, 3 vols. (Toulouse, 1841-43). Subsequent references are to page numbers of the first volume. The fullest discussion of the treatise is in the fourth volume of Joseph Anglade's edition of the abridged prose version (Toulouse and Paris, 1919-20). There is a convenient summary of Provençal poetics in Warner F. Patterson, Three Centuries of French Poetic Theory, University of Michigan Publications: Language and Literature, vols. 14-15 (Ann Arbor, 1935), pp. 34-52.

17. For a comparable delineation of lyric genres and their subject matter see the earlier treatise Doctrina de compondre dictats, ed. Paul Meyer, Romania, vi (1877), 355-58. There are a number of treatments of the Provençal lyric forms which work from the terminology in the poetry itself and in the vidas and razos; among the most thorough is Raynouard's, Choix des poésies originales des troubadours (1816-21; rpt. Osnabrück, 1966), ii, 155-319.

18. Jehan Maillart's Le Roman du Comte d'Anjou, written in 1316, confirms some of the aspects of lyric poetry under discussion. In prefatory remarks Maillart contrasts his own “pourfitables” work with “trufles” which merely “l'anui des cuers enchacent” instead of profiting the soul. The “trufles” include a number of troubadour song forms, such as “Lais d'amours, descors et balades, / Pour esbatre ces genz malades.” The condemnation is blanket and not very thoughtful, yet it may indicate a fairly common view of lyric poetry, one implicit in the treatises themselves, which sees it more as recreational or therapeutic entertainment than as serious literature meant to improve the soul. Ed. Mario Roques (Paris, 1931), pp. 1-2.

19. This justification of literature is not unique to the lyric tradition discussed here; it appears, for example, as a defense of some fabliaux. Nor is it insubstantial, for medieval psychology recognized the need for recreation. I deal more fully with these matters in an article forthcoming in Studies in Philology.

20. For a full discussion of the relationship between the late medieval French makers and their society see Daniel Poirion, Le Poète et le prince: L'évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d'Orleans (Paris, 1965), pp. 17-139.

21. The most complete discussion of the balade, with text, is T. Atkinson Jenkins, “Deschamps' Ballade to Chaucer,” Modern Language Notes, xxxiii (1918), 268-78. For literary indebtedness see the explanatory notes in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1957), from which I will cite line numbers for Chaucer's work subsequently. Robinson gives a convenient summary of Chaucer's probable acquaintances on p. xxvii.

22. Helen Louise Cohen, The Ballade (New York, 1915), pp. 222-99, discusses the history of the form in Middle English, with special attention to Chaucer as its first practitioner. Rossell Hope Robbins indicates Chaucer's pioneering role in the transfer of French verse to English in his survey article, “The Lyrics,” in Companion to Chaucer Studies, ed. Beryl Rowland (Toronto and New York, 1968), pp. 313-31.

23. For full documentation of all the references in Chaucer and his contemporaries to his lyric verse, see Arthur K. Moore, “Chaucer's Lost Songs,” JEGP, xlviii (1949), 196-208.

24. See above, p. 718 and n. 14; and Wesley Trimpi, “The Ancient Hypothesis of Fiction: An Essay on the Origins of Literary Theory,” Traditio, xxvii (1971), 63-65.

25. The Key of Remembrance, p. 45.

26. Thus Chaucer in the LGW Prologue: “Ye lovers that kan make of sentement” (F69); Machaut in the Remede de Fortune, speaking of his composition of love poetry: “Car qui de sentement ne fait, / Son ouevre et son chant contrefait” (II, 15). The Leys d'amors notes that the art of trobar enables one to “declarar et expressar son dezirier e sa voluntat” (10). Cf. Laurie, 568-69.

27. See Payne's discussion, pp. 91-111.