CRITICISM

Brownlee, Kevin. “Guillaume de Machaut Writes His Remede de Fortune: Lyricism in the Age of Allegory. In A New History of French Literature, edited by Dennis Hollier, pp. 109-14. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.

A detailed review of Machaut's principal works.

Curtius, Ernst Robert. “Poetry and Rhetoric.” In European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, translated by Willard R. Trask, pp. 145-66. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Discussion of the classical and medieval concept of the poet, with reference to Machaut. This work was originally published in 1948.

Grout, Donald Jay and Claude Palisca. “French and Italian Music in the Fourteenth Century.” A History of Western Music, pp. 97-120. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.

Includes a discussion of Machaut's work as a composer, explaining his use of fixed forms, which are relevant to both music and poetry.

Huizinga, Johan. “The Forms of Love.” In the Autumn of the Middle Ages, translated by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzch, pp. 126-55. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Provides a cultural, historical, and literary context for Machaut's conception of love.

Palmer, Barton. “The Matafictional Machaut: Self-Reflexivity and Self-Mediation in the Two Judgment Poems.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 20, no. 1 (spring 1987): 23–53.

An analysis of Jugement dou Roy de Behangue and Jugement dou Roy de Navarre, which demonstrates, with references to Machaut's oeuvre in general, that the poet's ultimate concern is not his subject matter but the idea of poetry itself.

Robertson, Ann Walters. Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context and Meaning in His Musical Works. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 456 p.

Examines the relationship between Machaut''s music and his poetry, noting his use of Latin religious discourse, the French vernacular tradition, and medieval mysticism.

Additional coverage of Machaut's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 208; and Reference Guide to World Literature, Eds. 2, 3.