Inspired partly by the popular animal fable, partly by the Latin satire of monastic life Ysengrimus (1152; Eng. trans. Ysengrimus), the collection of ribald comic tales known as the Roman de Renart (Renard the Fox) began to circulate in the late 12th century, chronicling the rivalry of Renart the Fox and the wolf Isengrin, and the lively and largely scandalous goings-on in the animal kingdom ruled by Noble the Lion. By the 14th century about 30 branches existed, forming a veritable beast epic. Full of close social observation, they exude the earthy humour of the fabliaux; but, particularly in some of the later branches, this is sharpened into true satire directed against abuses in church and state, with the friars and rapacious nobility as prime targets. Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“The Pilgrimage of Human Life”) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante’s contemporary and a precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple’s venture into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned. Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume’s delicate allegory with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning. Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the Querelle des Femmes (“Debate on Women”; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan’s attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399; “Epistle to the God of Love”), foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; “The Book of Three Virtues”; Eng. trans. A Medieval Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important social roles of women of all classes. Lyric poetry in the 14th century
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms: ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut’s great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart, the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years’ War, the poets were voicing a yearning for humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy (1424; “The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by his lady. Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years’ War was Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle, a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and events sometimes made cryptic by Villon’s taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament (or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of Orléans’s dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste. Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging. Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair, however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of their art. Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de Boron had used verse for his Joseph d’Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal (whose Cistercian author used Galahad’s Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To spin out their romances while maintaining their public’s interest, authors wove in many characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).