“Le Contraire Effacies”

This chapter addresses questions of literary and political authority in the writings of two of medieval France’s best known authors, Alain Chartier (c.1385–1430) and Guillaume de Machaut (1300–1377). Chartier was steeped in a rich culture of literary, political, and intellectual debate. His literary debates are heavily inflected by Machaut’s judgment poems. Chartier and Machaut’s positioning within the tradition of the reception of their works marks them as authority figures, or “sites” of authority, and that authority is paradoxically reinforced by textual and material attempts to erase it. In Machaut's “Judgement of the King of Navarre” (1349), the personification of Discretion urges the king of Navarre, appointed judge, to “le contraire effacies” (erase the opposite, v. 3432), or in other words perhaps: to spin the debate to give the desired outcome.