I will focus on Le Champion des dames by Martin Le Franc (c. 1440), Le Girouflier aux dames (c. 1480) and La Nef des dames vertueuses by Symphorien Champier (printed in Lyon in 1503). Each of these works quotes the sibyls' words, not only as samples of a prophetic language, but also as genuine lyrics, with varied and sophisticated patterns and imagery. This oracular poetry proves the poets' interest in generic diversity as well as literary technique and, at the same time, claims to give an example of feminine lyrics.

In these three texts which present themselves as 'louange/deffense des dames', I will first discuss the inclusion of these prophetic lyrics into a narrative work. What part do the sibylline prophecies, written in verse, play in such monuments as those of Le Franc and Champier? My aim is to show the ways in which sibylline prophecies are developed, elaborated, commented upon and incorporated by poets, in order to secure, for their own text, the argument that is necessary to any feminist work. What place do they devote to oracular poetry (at the end of the poem, as in the Girouflier, or during the dialogue, as in the Champion)? Second, sibylline poetry is both a performative and a self-sufficient play, and a pivot in the argumentation. Is there a conflict between these two functions? Does the feminist aim harm the poetic quality? Is this poetry prosaically transparent or mystically opaque? I will analyse the different poetic forms that are used (stanzas, lines, etc), and their relation to meaning. In what way are sibylline prophecies 'poetic'? In what way do they deliver a 'knowledge'? What is the role of metaphor, of connotations, in transmitting this knowledge? Many of the feminist works of the 15th Century are miscellanies, containing a good many mythological exempla. The 'oracular poetry' of the sibyls is an example of the presence of a 'chant pur' lost in the mélange of the didactic texts.

Christine de Pizan is remarkable in many ways, not least as an author who produced an extraordinarily large volume of writing in a comparatively short period. Among these works are several allegories, some written in verse (Epistre Othéa, Chemin de long estude, Mutacion de Fortune) and some written in prose (Cité des dames, Avision-Christine). Critics have tended to interpret Christine's movement from verse to prose allegory as a simply a choice motivated by convenience (the time-consuming nature of verse writing) or, somewhat more subtly, as an early manifestation of the complex and ornate prose style that would become ubiquitous in the later fifteenth century.

In this paper, I explore the extent to which Christine's movement to prose signals an effort to integrate the rational and argumentative structures found in late fourteenth-century French translations of philosophical and scientific writings within the originally poetic forms of medieval allegory. The paper begins by situating Christine's verse allegories within two contexts: the literary and generic context of medieval verse allegory, and the philosophical and scientific context of late fourteenth-century prose texts such as the translations of Aristotle produced by Nicole Oresme. These works, products of the ambitious translation project patronized by Charles V, are manifestations of the textual and reading community that both generated and nourished Christine's own approach to medieval poetics. The paper will close with an overview of Christine's prose, marking the beginning of an effort to understand how the pressures of content dictated new approaches to literary form in early fifteenth-century Paris.

Recent work by Daniel Hobbins, Mark S. Burrows and Brian Maguire has opened the way to fresh appraisals of the range of Jean Gerson's prolific literary output in both Latin and French. Gerson's criticisms of the Roman de la Rose are well known, but substantial questions still remain regarding the role played by his own poetry in developing and projecting his distinctive clerical subjectivity. Accordingly, this essay examines how Gerson's poetry, with its use of gendered and erotic imagery, addresses themes that have great significance for a broader range of his writings: Gerson's sense of himself as an outsider and 'exile', the importance of prophecies and visions to his 'pilgrim' persona, and the role played by biblical archetypes such as Jacob and St. Joseph in mediating his conception of the public and private worlds of the theologian. The paper thus contributes to our understanding of the role played by Latin poetry in academic and extramural communities in late-medieval France.

Le songe, supporté par la rime, devient une forme d'écriture et une forme de mesure de l'état du savoir qui peut passer, comme dans le Roman de la Rose, de l'antiquité à la contemporanéité, façonnant un genre divertissant et érudit, tel que le roman en rime, en une démonstration avancée des nouvelles connaissances scientifiques et de nouveaux débats philosophiques et politiques. La rime se prête donc à occuper cet espace de la représentation et de la transmission de la connaissance de manière 'plaisante' où, le coté didactique, perd sa connotation sérieuse, grâce aussi à une allégorisation du discours qui invite, à travers la collation de morceaux de savoir, à une réflexion sur soi et sur la vision du monde. Le Pèlerinage de vie humaine de Guillaume de Digulleville fait de la rime le support, comme jadis le fit Dante, pour traiter de la matière divine et redonner au songe son statut de connaissance de l'au-delà.

The focus of this paper is the illumination on folio 75v of BnF fr. 22545, which shows Guillaume de Machaut reading aloud to a group of listeners seated on a grassy hill. Although the manuscript is a compilation of vernacular love poetry, Machaut is shown wearing the robe of a university magister, sitting on a raised chair, and reading from a lectern.

An exploration of earlier teaching pictures demonstrated the roots of this iconography, and how some of the artists who illuminated the translations commissioned by Charles V sought to represent the translatio studii via adaptations of teaching iconography. The artist who matched a representation of Valerius Maximus 'teaching' Tiberius with a scene of Simon de Hesdin presenting the translated Fais et dis mémorables to Charles V turns out to be the same artist as the one who painted the Machaut picture: namely, Perrin Remiet (Michael Camille's 'Master of Death'). Comparison with other Remiet illuminations confirms this artist's interest in transferring the authority and prestige of the magister to the vernacular poet. It seems likely that Jean Froissart saw and imitated this move in the incipit illumination of BnF fr. 831, which similarly shows him as master reading to his audience.

Fama studies have shown that far from holding rigorously distinct conceptions of opinion and knowledge, medieval culture, by encouraging eye-witness report, and then the report of eye-witness report, and so on, 'built' knowledge as the accumulation of many voices deemed reliable. The truth, constituted by the talk about an event, then by the talk about the talk, in turn became more talk. The question, Quid est fama? ( 'what is the talk?' 'what is being said?') routinely asked at trials as a means of extracting evidence, was but the visible part of a widely rooted set of assumptions and conventions that governed the making and transmitting of information. The process was by definition a living one that depended on fama (talk) and commune renommée (common knowledge, what everybody knows)and in its strictest definition, it could not produce permanent knowledge. When a bit of talk came to be written down, it was as something already frozen, out of the loop; something no longer vital.

I take the Songe véritable, a political pamphlet in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, as both central to my presentation and as a point of departure for comments on it as representative of a genre, including some comparison with the political 'song' in England. The Songe is an often overlooked political allegory featuring a figure named Commune Renommee, who is said to see (know) things better than anyone else. Bernard Guenée's recent, very useful study of opinion in the chronicle in prose by the Religieux de Saint-Denis (L'opinion publique à la fin du Moyen Age, Perrin, 2002), which examines that work alone and through it suggests the effect of public opinion in late medieval France, does not touch on the Songe. Where the chronicle tends to report the talk about the talk, the Songe is the talk, frightening in its anonymity, thorough in denouncing numbers of King Charles VI's entourage, and completely persuaded of the truth it advances. Although I cannot hope to examine all the questions the Songe raises for me in the course of one talk, I would like to concentrate on the medieval overlap between opinion and knowledge, as I suggest above, as well as on the irreconcilability of living fama and writing; the two subjects are not unconnected.

This paper focuses on manuscripts including one or two works by Christine rather than on the collected-works manuscripts produced under her direction. Of this corpus of 60 odd manuscripts, only three contain courtly love lyrics: Berne, Burgerbibl. 205, Stockholm, Vu 22 and London, Westminster Abbey 21. The manuscript collections thus tend to express the didactic, political, religious or philosophical bent evident in the works by Christine that they contain. In the Berne and Stockholm manuscripts, the presence of courtly lyric is very slight. These poems seem to have been incuded because their formal and verbal virtuosity was admired. A courtly lyric may be paired with a didactic poem of the same form to serve as its foil. Courtly lyric may constitute a theme that runs through the collection, associating a small cluster of poems with other longer texts, didactic or satiric in tone, that refer to lyric genres. The only manuscript collection in which courtly lyric plays a major role is Westminster 21. Here courtly texts surround and undercut a small group of didactic, antifeminist dits. Key in the design of this distinctively courtly anthology are the two works by Christine, the Epistre au dieu d'amour and the Dit de la pastoure, which echo the series of courtly lyrics that open the anthology (citing names of poets whose lyrics are included in the manuscript, refering to the courts of love also evoked in the series of courtly love lyrics and demandes amoureuses). These three collections are relatively modest manuscripts, on paper, with limited decoration, if any. The Berne and Stockholm collections circulated outside Paris among lower-rung officials who, though they were not particularly drawn to courtly lyric, were familiar with it and considered it important enough to make it an element in these collections.

Why did late medieval writers so often use the terms poetry and compilation, and poet and compiler, interchangeably? During the great and rowdy Quarrel of the Romance of the Rose, advocates both for and against referred to the Rose by both terms. The answer may lie with one of the Debate's interlocutors, Christine de Pizan, who referred to her own works as both poetry and compilation. Christine, like Jean de Meun and Dante before her, was deeply familiar with William of Conches' reflections on the nature of poetry. Poetry was both a sign of the truth and a veil over it. But Christine's musings on compilation were unique. In her biography of Charles V, she insisted on the intellectual nature of compilation as a subtly woven tapestry whose disparate threads came together to serve the end of [her] imagination. This end was arguably the same as truth. Unlike those 'lewd compilers' Chaucer and Boccaccio, Christine assumed full and unironic ownership of her compilations. In this paper, I will explore Christine's complementary notions of poetry and compilation, as well as their implications for reading. In Christine's formulation, reading becomes creative, and writing, analytical. Together, poetry and compilation foster the analysis and creation of knowledge. This analysis will touch on the letters on the Rose, the Mutacion de Fortune, the Fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V, and the Advision Cristine.

Le projet de cette communication est d'éclairer la genèse et les enjeux du cycle des 25 Ballades des Princes de Jean Meschinot, oeuvre composée à deux voix, puisqu'à partir de refrains de ballades composés par Chastelain. Il s'agit pour cela non seulement de resituer la série des sixains anaphoriques dans la lignée d'un groupe de textes qui appellent à dialogue et à amplification - éléments négligés par A. Piaget qui les a édités - mais aussi s'interroger sur leur finalité polémique et politique. Il apparaît après analyse que si les sixains de Chastelain peuvent être rattachés à une polémique contre la personne propre de Louis XI et si le jeu de dialogue qui s'instaure entre les deux poètes peut correspondre à un moment de la vie politique du XVe siècle, le projet de Meschinot prend une tout autre dimension ; il développe à sa manière le propos du poète bourguignon, ce qui représente certes une prouesse formelle, mais surtout il en redistribue et infléchit la matière au point de faire de ces Ballades des Princes une sorte de miroir, destiné au monde de la cour, et exaltant surtout la dimension humaine et universelle de la figure du souverain. Au travers d'un discours obligé dans la forme comme dans la thématique apparaissent les traits saillants de l'imaginaire du poète breton, pour qui l'objet de la prouesse est toujours celui d'une amplificatio à l'indiscutable valeur morale.

This paper investigates the ideological and discursive significance behind the choice of verse over prose in the context of translating Latin material into Old French. Contrasting Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose with his prose translations of learned Latin texts, it re-examines and problematises the standard claim that verse is the medium of falsehood opposed to the reputed veracity of prose. The perceived nature and purpose of translation is significant here, as during the thirteenth century translation could be adaptation, where the interpretation and transmission of meaning was more important than any fidelity to original form. Latin texts in verse or in a combination of verse and prose, such as Boethius' Consolations, are translated into French as prose. Prose is equated with truth and authenticity of meaning, in contrast to the aesthetic excess of verse, but this prioritisation of prose is revealed to be a manifestation of professional rivalry, especially amongst translators who seek to assert the primacy of their versions over pre-existing versified translations of the same material.

The Roman de la Rose typifies the excess of verse, where rhyme produces a proliferation of figurative allusions and verbal associations that create a layering of meaning to be interpreted. Rhyme displays the virtuosity and complexity of language, and composition in rhyme provides a way of linking vernacular texts with the transmission and application of a certain kind of linguistic and cultural knowledge.

As Gabrielle Spiegel has explored so fruitfully, the northern francophone aristocracy employed vernacular prose in their fight against encroaching royal power in the thirteenth century. Similarly, scholars have long noted that various thirteenth-century poetic texts (e.g. the Crusade cycle) were composed to glorify the ancestors and/or lineage of a noble family. However, the earliest extant manuscripts of both chronicles and poetic narratives date, for the most part, from the end of the thirteenth or beginning of the fourteenth centuries. In this paper, I propose to examine the later medieval manuscripts of a group of French narratives glorifying female ancestors of the counties of Ponthieu and Boulogne (e.g. Le Roman du comte de Ponthieu, the Crusade Cycle) in order to explore why such narratives may have been recopied in this period. I have chosen these particular neighboring counties as they experienced significant periods of female lordship as well as conflicted loyalties between France and Flanders, and the larger regions (Picardy-Flanders) was at the forefront of literary production in the 13th century.

Between the middle and the end of the 14th century, several poets in northern France take up the old literary genre of the chanson de geste, by either completely re-writing existing texts or composing new ones. Although these poets do continue the general trends of 13th-century epic in many respects (such as the narrative character and length of the poems, most of which comprise entire life-stories), we nevertheless observe a significant effort to return to older forms and motifs (laisses become shorter again, some enchaînement of laisses is put in place, addresses to the public that seemingly imply a sung poem are repeated more frequently. Some of these are presented as the openings of separate performance sessions, and might perhaps be intended as such, but the poems would, however, have been read, rather than sung, in performance). There appears to have been a conscious attempt at renewing the epic of old, an attempt that may have been due, at least initially, to a specific political intent.

In the context of this colloquium on poetry and knowledge three motifs, or groups of motifs, must attract our attention: 1) the presentation of the text itself, as it occurs at the opening and elsewhere in the text, 2) the terms used for designating authorities or sources quoted, and 3) the allusions and references made to other specific texts. All three are typical motifs of epic at least since the beginning of the 12th century (the second occurs already in the Chanson de Roland). However, in 14th-century texts they all undergo typical modifications. My analysis is based essentially on Tristan de Nanteuil and the Chanson de Bertrand du Guesclin, with a few examples taken from other texts.

1) In the 14th century, an epic text may be presented not only as 'chanson' or 'estoire' but also as 'livre' and very often as 'roman'. The poet's activity is designated mostly by unspecific verbs such as 'compter', 'dire', whereas 'chanter' occurs less frequently. Some more 'scientific' terms ('deviser', 'signifier') are also used. Moreover, in the conventional addresses to the public, the poems are not only praised in the traditional, very general terms ('bonne', 'glorieuse' etc.); several poets rather insist on the profit, especially the moral benefit, the reader or the audience may gain from their texts.

2) The citation of authorities or sources has become a banality, frequently used to fill up a line. Nevertheless, it seems interesting that the authorities cited are not only 'escripts', 'escritures', 'croniques', or 'estoires', but very often 'romans' and even 'chansons'. There is no qualitative distinction any more between the authorities and the texts themselves; both may belong to the same categories of texts.

In this paper, the Art d'amours en prose, a thirteenth-century annotated translation of Ovid's Ars amatoria, will serve as a springboard to question the medieval truism that prose was the vehicle of truth. Focusing on the mise en oeuvre and mise en texte of the nearly 200 vernacular lyric citations, poetic refrains and rhymed proverbs that appear in the commentary, I will explore the following issues: To what extent does this work reflect a medieval debate concerning the importance of modes of expression to the transmission of knowledge? What can this work tell us about the power of the poetic medium to communicate knowledge at the same time that it serves to destabilize and/or fragment truth? Finally, what does the graphic presentation of this complex work in the extant manuscripts teach us about the reception of poetry as a distinct and unique medium?

Dans le long récit allégorique en vers des Eschés amoureux (c.1370-1380), la partie d'échecs est l'unique moment où le fil des discours didactiques est suspendu au profit de la seule narration. L'échiquier ainsi que les trente-deux pièces du jeu sont décrits au cours d'une minutieuse ekphrasis. Le narrateur est ensuite maté en l'angle par la jeune fille contre laquelle il est sommé de jouer et perd allégoriquement son coeur en perdant son roi. Cette intervention a tenté de mettre en évidence la fonction de cet épisode ludique dans l'économie d'un récit à visée édifiante. Deux attitudes contradictoires sont mises en jeu par les échecs: le narrateur appréhende l'échiquier comme un pur objet poétique, en s'oubliant dans la contemplation des pièces, quand la jeune fille a une approche plus rationnelle et se comporte en technicienne, détentrice d'un savoir. La défaite du narrateur éveille en lui un désir de revanche, répété à maintes reprises dans le texte. Or, les deux manuscrits qui conservent Les Eschés amoureux sont inachevés et ne mentionnent pas de revanche: le retour de la trame narrative fonctionne comme un procédé dynamique déceptif. Le jeune homme n'apprend donc pas à jouer au cours du récit et ne peut mater en retour sa redoutable adversaire. L'analyse codicologique de l'un des deux manuscrits permet toutefois de conférer à cet épisode une valeur didactique intrinsèque. Des gloses marginales en latin commentent la description des pièces et permettent de penser ce texte comme le support d'un apprentissage. La partie fictive pouvait s'inscrire dans le cadre d'une performance mettant en scène un élève et un précepteur, dont les explications trouvent une trace dans les gloses marginales du manuscrit de Venise. Un échiquier réel devait sans doute accompagner cet enseignement. Apprendre à jouer et surtout apprendre à aimer seraient alors les buts pédagogiques de l'épisode: en étudiant les différents mouvements des pièces, le lecteur voit se dessiner un art d'aimer. La structure poétique de l'échiquier, dans laquelle s'abîme le narrateur, informe ici le didactique.

Troubadour poetry set the trend for viewing and treating medieval lyric generically as canso, sirventès, pastorela, planh, ensenhamen, tenso, enueig, and so on. The terms come down to us from the troubadours themselves who used them to differentiate and define the subject matter, formal variation and performative modes that make their repertoire so rich. Often enough, we tend to associate - or even to restrict - certain kinds of content with specific genres. Thus, fin'amors with the canso, politics and satire with the sirventès, religious sentiment with the crusade songs, and so on.

For a deeply-rooted mindset, generic association might even determine visual representation, as with some of the historiated initials of Thibaud de Champagne's lyric in trouvère MS M (BNF fr. 844), the so-called Manuscrit du roy. There, the overwhelming association of the chanson with 'courtly love' dictates representations of the poet-lover, mounted and armed, lance at the ready, charging out of the initial into the love lyric.

Innovations in thirteenth-century romance such as the lyric insertions found in Jean Renart's Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, or in Gerbert de Nevers's Roman de la Violette, only reinforce generic typification by interjecting love lyrics within courtly settings. Lyric in such instances functions primarily as precisely what Jean Renart calls it: an entertaining diversion and rhetorical ornamentation. One absolutely fundamental characteristic of this lyric does not lend itself to generic typification, however, and that is the intimate link between poetry and philosophy in the troubadours and trouvères. Sometimes, the philosophic agenda may be obvious, as with the genre most overtly associated with didacticism, the ensenhamen. But it would be a mistake to think of philosophy in medieval lyric as resolutely didactic, and thus limited to the one genre. Arnaut de Maruelh, for example, does not hesitate to begin one of his best-known cansos by juxtaposing beauty and true learning:

[The great beauty, refined learning, true worth, great praiseworthiness, courtly language and vivid eloquence which reside in you, noble and good lady, give me knowledge and wit to sing...]

This paper will seek, in the first instance, to suggest ways by which the troubadours, followed by the trouvères, created poetic modes for 'translating' - in Derrida's sense of 'philosophy as translation' - philosophic knowledge into poetic knowledge. Secondly, I want to explore the reciprocal of this movement whereby a clerk like Jean de Meun adopts the even more challenging task of 'translating' not simply philosophy itself into poetry, but also philosophical expressive modes, such as quaestio, quodlibet, disputatio into a new, muscular poetry whose force springs directly from the modes of philosophy it deploys. By way of contextualizing these concerns, I shall base the discussion of texts cited upon manuscripts ranging from the late thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. And finally, by way of situating the issues discussed more broadly, I want to consider the medieval project in the light of reflections on knowledge, language, and translation in thinkers on the order of Plato, Augustine, Derrida, Agamben and Heller-Roazen.

One of the primary functions of verse in the vernacular works of the French Middle Ages (beyond the representation of the speaking voice) is to present knowledge, information, and learning as moral wisdom. Paradoxically, the artifices of medieval French love lyrics are not governed by the signifying practices of verse. Although they constantly express moral judgments about their particular subject matter - opposing bone amor to felonie - medieval French love lyrics are most deeply expressive of techne, of knowledge as art rather than as wisdom or learning.

However, as the love lyric enters into writing in the later 13th and in the 14th century, the material book serves as a powerful technology for remotivating the vernacular lyric in new contexts through patterns of compilation, opening the way for it to express high visions of knowledge as moral wisdom. This is a period of extraordinary experimentation in different ways poets and compilers could arrange lyrics in books in order to represent moral knowledge. Notable examples include Dante's Convivio (1307) where the love lyrics are embedded in philosophical commentary in Italian prose; Petrarch's Rime sparse (1327) where material arrangement of love lyrics marks out a moral progression towards conversion ; and the 'schemes and patterns' of Machaut's motets 1-19 (composed in the 1320's), whose order leads to a mystical scens. Such ensembles of song and commentary or such significant arrangements of lyrics are shaped by large-scale compositions that depend on writing, compilation, and physical layout. Their moral meanings emerge as readers manipulate the pages of the material book and consider different texts together, in a process I call reciprocal reading.

In my talk on the ways medieval love lyrics could be set into the material book to express moral wisdom, I will describe one striking collection of love lyrics which have not yet received the critical attention they deserve and which are contextualized in a book in a way that make them feed into a fountain of moral and political wisdom. These are the 34 lyrics attributed to Jehannot de Lescurel, known only in the celebrated MS BnF fr. 146, which also contains the illustrated version of the satirical Roman de Fauvel expanded by 169 musical insertions in Latin and French, 8 political dits by Geffroi de Paris (also in Latin and French), and a metrical chronicle of the kingdom of France from 1300 to 1317. All of these work are in verse, and all - with the exception of the Lescurel lyrics - have been shown to contribute directly to the overall purpose of this manuscript: it is a mirror for the Prince, an admonitio addressed to Philip V, second son of Philip the Fair, in 1316-17.

Only the the collection of love lyrics by Jehannot de Lescurel has not seemed relevant to the overall purpose of Fr. 146. My aim is to show how the arrangement of these pieces in this compilation draw Lescurel's lyrics into the manuscript's program of political and moral wisdom. Such meanings are signaled by various material means which link the lyrics to features of the moral satire and the dits, including page layout, quire order, and concordances with refrains in the Fauvel, as well as the significance of their A-G alphabetical order, and their combination of lyric and semi-lyric pieces. These material signs point readers to the thematic reinterpretation of love in Fr. 146. It is given a darkly negative value in the interpolated Roman de Fauvel where 14 love lyrics and 13 refrains are put in the mouth of Fauvel, the evil horse of hypocrisy, who is the only false lover actually depicted singing in medieval French literature. His fausse musique allegorizes the denunciation of carnality in Fr. 146, represented in the marriage of bestial Fauvel to Vainglory and in the accounts of the adultery of the daughters-in-law of Philip IV in Geffroi's dits and in the metrical chronicle. In turn, thematic links and patterns of compilation crowd overtones of moral meaning into the stereotyped formulas of the Lescurel lyrics, forcing them towards politics and history.

The presence of Lescurel's handsome ensemble of lyrics in Fr. 146 points to a community of readers deeply engaged in poetry both as techne and as moral and political knowledge. The forward-looking poetic forme fixe style and novel mensural notation of the Lescurel lyrics add immesurably to the lavish display of music, art, and poetry on these pages intended for readers in the royal court of France. These readers in high places are equally concerned with poetic art and with political lessons and moral wisdom, served up by the Lescurel lyrics not by commentary (as in Dante), nor solely by arrangement (as in Petrarch and Machaut), but by a combination of arrangement and contextualization in the material book that makes them yield a rich store of poetic knowledge.

Adam de la Halle's Jeu de Robin et Marion is full of refrains, four of which are cited outside the play in chansons avec refrains, motets, and romances. This paper sketches a reception history of the Jeu through the transmission of its refrains, which connect the play to a diverse body of musical and poetic works. Within the context of the play itself, these refrains often reference narrative and generic models that help readers interpret Adam's new work. In other cases, the refrain citations are linked to Adam's authorial persona. By citing refrains from the songs of arrageois trouvères active in generations before him, I argue that the refrains allow listeners to place Adam within a sounding genealogy of poets from his own region. Finally, a fourteenth-century citation of the refrain 'Hé! Resveille toi' provides a reflection on the history of the pastourelle genre, providing a commentary on Adam's play and all of its early generic models. The refrains in the Jeu de Robin et Marion demonstrate the ways in which medieval poets and composers employed refrain citation to create community within their texts. Listening through the cited refrains, audiences could hear a larger body of texts that were expressive of regional identity, genre, and authorial traditions.

'Tout discrete creature cherche a savoir', the French translation of the first line of Aristotle's Metaphysics, had a varied posterity. It appears in works as seemingly diverse as Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire d'amours, Evrard de Conti's Echecs amoureux, Gilles le Muisit's Lamentations, and the so-called 'Gui de Mori' recasting of Le Roman de la Rose (which I claim was actually the work of the theologian Guilbert de Tournai). Christine de Pizan quoted the line as well, three times in fact, once in verse, in Ballad 98 of Les Cent Ballades, and twice in prose, in her biography of Charles V, Les Fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V. The line from the Metaphysics also found its way into a French sermon on St. Anthony preached by the leading Christian theologian of the time, Jean Gerson.

My paper deals with poetry's role in transmitting knowledge and imparting wisdom, as that subject was treated by Christine and Gerson. I take as my starting points three works composed in the period 1403-1404: Christine's biography of 'the Wise King' Charles V and two of Gerson's sermons, his St. Anthony sermon and his famous Passion sermon. In addition, to complement Christine's explicit statements on poetry found primarily in Charles's biography, I will consider the ideas Gerson expresses about poetry in his Tractatus de Canticis (Treatise on Songs), which he composed near the end of his life. Although this work is in Latin, what Gerson says there about poetry holds for his French as well as for his Latin poems.

In considering these four texts, we will see, first, that Christine and Gerson both reinforce their polemics by translating key ideas from St. Thomas Aquinas's late thirteenth-century commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics (1271-1272) and second, that they both combine Aristotelian and Thomist ideas on poetry with notions derived from Augustine's Confessions, City of God, and Soliloquies. They do the latter in conformity with the list of authorities that Charles had translated into French, which Christine sets forth in Book 3, Chapter 12 of her biography. My topic helps us understand why Gerson, who allied himself with Christine in condemning Le Roman de la Rose, a text that for many people epitomized poetry in the Middle Ages, prefaced his 1403 Passion sermon with a moving quatrain probably of his own invention.

My overarching argument is that in their use of poetry, whether seen in its restricted sense as verse or in its broader sense as fiction, Christine and Gerson were pushing to its logical conclusion a tendency seen in the French tradition since its inception in the ninth century. That tendency was to promote poetry, and in particular vernacular poetry, as a tool in the search for truth and wisdom.

The understudied prose version of the Roman de la Violette, completed after the death of Philip the Good in 1467, shares typical features of a 15th century mise en prose of romance. The text's prologue heralds the value of chivalric feats which 'ont esté et sont encores prise pour bonne exemple, miroir et fondation' while also adopting a critical stance vis-à-vis the poem's 'parfluïté ou trop d'abondance de langaige'. The prose text does not, however, jettison the well-known lyrical insertions of the 13th century original as other mises en prose do, but rather renders them in a distinct social and textual idiom. This paper will examine the new economy of poetic knowledge and chivalric performance and the authority it acquires in Burgundian prose. It will also attempt to make some claims about poetry as an object of knowledge and heritage in a milieu dominated by prose.

Le savoir des vidas et des razos sur les troubadours est au mieux incertain, au pire fantaisiste. C'est pourtant la somme de ce savoir qui donne le sentiment d'une communauté de poètes. Leur capacité herméneutique paraît modeste. On aurait tort cependant de négliger leur idée de la poésie - celle qu'elles appliquent aux chansons des troubadours et celle qu'elles incarnent en tant qu'oeuvres poétiques. Dira-t-on que ce ne sont pas des oeuvres poétiques parce qu'elles sont en prose ? Mais le latin réservant généralement le mot poésie au seul mètre et plaçant souvent la poésie rythmique du côté de la prose, toute composition vernaculaire, à ce compte, est en prose. Aussi bien, les chansonniers qui les contiennent n'identifient pas graphiquement les vers. Dira-t-on que ce ne sont pas des oeuvres poétiques parce qu'elles ne livrent pas le savoir et le sens de la fable antique, qui définissent longtemps le champ d'application des mots poète et poésie ? Précisément: par le retour sur un passé récent, elles inaugurent la modernité en poésie, au moment même où les troubadours, qualifiés d'antiques, paraissent à Matfre Ermengaud des autorités suffisantes pour fonder un savoir poétique de l'amour.