The Gordian knot of late medieval poetry – fiction in truth, truth in fiction – cannot be undone by simply cutting it, letting the loose threads fall apart in disorder. The problem as witnessed in medieval autobiography – what is true? what is false? – is only one manifestation of the issue. The overarching question is, how did medieval authors want us to distinguish an author’s truth from the author’s fiction? That is the issue this book takes up: the interlacing features of medieval writing that foreground both its fiction and its truth (or truths). What Machaut claims in his Prise d’Alexandrie – ‘Il dient en leur verité’ (v. 7280/7279/7273) [they express their own truth]– holds generally for all medieval French authors who claim to speak the truth in what they write. The issues such claims raise prove especially crucial for modern readers. Although these truths may be presented in pleasing form, how many of us accept the truths medieval writers promote or even believe what they wrote to be beautiful? Put another way, what made their writing both rationally convincing and aesthetically appealing for medieval audiences?

The Voir Dit is a key work in this matter. Its very title encourages readers to seek the truth of what it presents in its conjointure of identifiable events in Machaut’s life with events in the Hundred Years War and fictitious matiere. We are further assisted in reading his montage of truth and fiction (to use Jacqueline Cerquiglini’s defining term for the dit) because the Voir Dit purports to tell the story of an apprenticeship in the poet’s own art of poetry.

The epigraphs to this monograph express in a nutshell the issue of truth and fiction in writing and its paradoxical status in medieval literature. Blending truth and fiction, the jeu-parti model so common from Chrétien de Troyes to François Villon poses quandaries not only for modern readers, but for medieval audiences as well. Jeux-partis set up debates in which the issue is as arbitrary as are the sides chosen, and judgment is almost never pronounced as to which side is right and which is wrong.