Courting Controversy?

This chapter uses Machaut’s JRB and JRN as a launch-pad for reading the relationship of response between Martin Le Franc’s Champion des dames (c.1442) and Complainte du livre du Champion des dames a maistre Martin le Franc son acteur, with the aim of understanding better the stakes at play in the fifteenth-century false retraction. The Champion references explicitly to Machaut’s judgment poems, and both the Champion and Complainte entertain an analogous interaction of metatextuality, intertextuality, and historical reference. This results in a similarly enticing and subtle interlacing of poetry and court politics. Le Franc and Machaut contribute distinctively to a characteristically late-medieval reflection on authorship as a dialogic process concerned as much with book reception as with its production.