poem Complainte Rutebeuf and in his crusade piece Dit de Pouille (ca. 1265) and whom
he eulogizes in 1271. The poet also appeals repeatedly to King Philip III the Bold to
replace generous benefactors lost on the Crusades. Like the eulogies and commissioned
devotional works, Rutebeuf’s political poems and appeals for largesse mark his status as
a skilled professional poet and his relations with patrons in the highest ecclesiastical and
aristocratic circle.
Rutebeuf composed a number of comic pieces like those described in minstrel
repertoires. His Dit de l’herberie is one of several examples of a dramatic monologue by
a quack who amuses an audience with rapid enumerations of coins, exotic places, stones,
and herbal remedies. All of Rutebeuf’s fabliaux are known in other medieval versions:
the story of the Franciscan who enrolls a girl in his monastic order (Frère Denise); the
tale of the wife who pretends that her midnight rendezvous with the priest is a devotional
exercise (Dame qui fist trois tours autour du moutier); the account of the bishop who
gave Christian burial to a donkey who left him twenty pounds (Testament de l’âne). The
theme of the obscene Pet au vilain is reused in André de la Vigne’s farce, the Meunier de
qui le diable emporte l’âme en enfer (1496).
Rutebeuf also had sufficient clerical training to read Latin and know the student’s life.
His Dit de l’université is a sympathetic account of a peasant boy come to study in Paris
who soon squanders his hard-earned funds on pretty city girls. Though not a vulgarizer of
philosophical and scientific concepts like his contemporary Jean de Meun, he draws on
Latin sources for his saints’ lives, miracles, polemical poems, and requests for largesse.
In the Dit d’Aristote, he translates a passage from the epic Alexandreis by Walter of
Châtillon; in Sainte Elysabel, he abridges a Latin vita; in his miracle of the Sacristain et
la femme au chevalier, he expands an exemplum from the early 13th-century Sermones
vulgares of the preacher Jacques de Vitry. Rutebeuf’s lives of exemplary penitents
combine French and Latin sources in the narrative Sainte Marie l’Egyptienne and the
Miracle de Théophile, which dramatizes versions by Gautier de Coinci and Fulbert of
Chartres. He even translates and glosses lines from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in his
allegorical Voie de paradis.
Rutebeuf s clerical training not only led him to rich literary sources, it also determined
his subjects and his style. Rutebeuf s moral poems contribute to the ecclesiastical effort,
inspired by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), to instruct laypeople in religious doctrine:
his Voie de paradis is an allegorical catechism of confession; three works, the Etat, Vie,
and Plaies du monde, adapt the conventional estates satire of Latin preachers and
moralists for a lay public. In contrast with the self-reflective mode of contemporary
courtly lyric and moral verse, Rutebeuf’s poetry often seeks to turn its hearers toward the
outer world of history painted in dramatic moral colors.
Commissioned by supporters of the crusade policies of Louis IX and the pope,
Rutebeuf’s eleven crusade poems incorporate estates satire and rhetorical techniques of
moral persuasion from the didactic tradition to rouse public opinion in favor of
increasingly unpopular crusades against Charles of Anjou’s Christian rival for the
Sicilian throne (1265) and against the Muslims in Tunis (1270). As a professional
pamphleteer, Rutebeuf does not express personal opinions in his poems. He advocates the
differing views of the two causes he served in order to sway public opinion and
encourage partisans to action; he is an ardent supporter of papal policies in his crusade
verse, a fiery Gallican in his defense of university autonomy.
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