Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Note on References and Quotations
- Introduction
- Part I An Art of Love
- Part II An Art of Poetry
- Part III Machaut’s Legacy in Poetry and Music
- Afterword
- Bibliography of Primary Sources
- Bibliography of Secondary Studies
- Index
- Already Published
2 - The Vicissitudes of Good Love: A Quandary?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Note on References and Quotations
- Introduction
- Part I An Art of Love
- Part II An Art of Poetry
- Part III Machaut’s Legacy in Poetry and Music
- Afterword
- Bibliography of Primary Sources
- Bibliography of Secondary Studies
- Index
- Already Published
Summary
Biau sire Diex! comment puet ce estre
Que je sui si fort mis à mestre
Que departir,
Deguerpir
Ne fuïr
Ne puet mes cuers de son dous estre
Eins est toudis dessous sa destre
Pour li servir,
Oubeir
Et cherir?(Lai 19, v. 75–84)
Ainssi la tres noble doctrine
Qui tant est precieuse et fine
De la belle me doctrina,
Qui toute bonne doctrine a.(Remede, v. 353–6)
The epigraphs to this chapter pose in dramatic pedagogical language the quandary that emerges in Machaut’s Fontaine amoureuse and, more profoundly, his Voir Dit. Like Esperance in the Remede, Toute Belle in the Voir Dit teaches Guillaume by her good and stable love how he himself should return her love – what the Echecs moralisés calls ‘reamacion’ (271r17). In Toute Belle’s case love is based on good hope and souffisance, virtues that Guillaume describes as characterizing her love for him in this dit that he writes for her about their love. She, Guillaume asserts, teaches him how to love well, not with the traditional grammarian’s rod but by her eloquence and comportment. Like the lover in Lay 19 (also quoted as the epigraph to chapter one), Guillaume, an unstable and badly performing lover, thrashes himself with the rods of desire and jealousy, thereby evincing a possessive love that has, moreover, enslaved and mastered him: he is himself possessed. Robbed of good hope and souffisance by submission to his master, he loses the constancy and trust in good love that Esperance propounds in the Remede and that Toute Belle practices and promotes in the Voir Dit.
Given this depiction, the Voir Dit as well as the Fontaine amoureuse may well seem a partial retreat from the idealism and the almost superhuman virtue, rationality, and steadfastness Guillaume exemplifies in the Alerion. But, as we have seen, both the Remede and the Confort d’ami warn of the potential instability of love’s see-sawing between bad desire and good hope. By juxtaposing these emotions as contraires choses, Machaut actually defines two kinds of love more precisely, sharpening the distinction between the two emotions and, consequently, between the two kinds of love they exemplify.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Machaut and the Medieval Apprenticeship TraditionTruth, Fiction and Poetic Craft, pp. 51 - 94Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014