1 - Villon: a dying man

Summary

A dying man can speak his mind.

– Villon, Testament, line 728

French literature of the Middle Ages is enormously rich and varied. It comprises, among other genres, heroic epics, courtly romances, verse narratives, religious drama, fables and lyric poetry. In recent years study of medieval French literature has been revitalized by innovative critical approaches that encourage the reading of relevant texts in terms of a literary culture built on sophisticated (and often playful) rewriting of traditional stories. Such approaches imply a fluid notion of literary creation untrammelled by restrictive notions of ‘author’ and ‘text’: ‘Medieval writers acknowledge that texts do not derive exclusively from or belong to their authors, that they have multiple origins, that they are indeed “a tissue of quotations” and, above all, that they go on developing and evolving as they are read, reread and rewritten in transmission.’ The lyric poet François Villon (c. 1431 – after 1463) recasts the courtly ideals and conventional pieties of medieval literary tradition, subverting his models by writing in a predominantly ironic mode. Lyric poetry and first-person narratives before Villon are strongly allegorical, and rarely the expression of individualized sentiment; lacking a clear historical dimension, they deal in stock character types (such as the knight-errant, despairing lover, repentant sinner, etc.) and are written in highly stylized poetic language. The greatest impact of Villon's work, as David Georgi argues, is its contribution to the emergence of the intimate first-person voice in European poetry. Villon also created, in his life and work, the figure of the poète maudit (the accursed poet, or poet with endless bad luck), who would become a familiar feature of the French poetic tradition. The poetic persona he developed evokes the experience of a marginal man living in a recognizable social reality: he engages imaginatively with the great themes of the literature and art of his age – death, the vagaries of fate, the ravages of time – in conjunction with poverty and the fragility of existence in fifteenth-century Paris.