In his fourteen poems supporting the secular university masters against their
Franciscan and Dominican rivals and the pope, Rutebeuf again recasts the motifs of
didactic poetry to new, polemical ends. Dream allegories, battles of vices and virtues,
animal satires, complaints attributed to the church personified—all the resources of the
Latin and French satirical tradition are brought to bear on partisan concerns. Knowledge
of historical circumstances is essential to the understanding of Rutebeuf s topical poems:
the proliferation of mendicant orders in Paris (Ordres de Paris, Chanson des ordres, Des
béguines); the struggle between mendicants and secular clergy for parish privileges and
university chairs (Discorde de l’université et des Jacobins, Des règles, Dit de sainte
Église, Bataille des vices et des vertus, Des Jacobins); the writings of William of Saint-
Amour, banished leader of the university masters (Dit and Complainte de Guillaume).
Out of this factional literature rises a new allegorical figure, Hypocrisy, which comes to
overshadow earlier concern with pride and avarice and dominate moral literature of the
late 13th and 14th centuries. Personified in Rutebeuf’s Du Pharisien and Dit
d’Hypocrisie, hypocrisy is central to Jean de Meun’s character False Seeming in the
Roman de la Rose as well as in late animal satires, such as Renart le contrefait and the
Livres de Fauvel.
Polemical, pious, or entertaining in topic and nonlyric in form, Rutebeuf’s poems have
a style and shape that owe little to prevailing courtly modes. His characteristic form is the
first-person nonmusical dit, a rambling, open form, most often cast in octosyllabic
couplets or tercets, that accommodates all the topical themes of contemporary history that
found little place in courtly song, romance, or epic. In spite of their rhetorical embroidery
and rich rhymes, Rutebeuf’s poems give an overall impression of artless simplicity and
directness. His verses are engaging and amusing: enlivened with frequent irony, animated
with proverbs, touched with realistic details. Lively, colloquial direct discourse and
dialogue characterize both Rutebeuf’s poems and the tableaux of his Miracle de
Théophile. Often shaped as complaintes, Rutebeuf’s dits pass easily from one subject to
another via apostrophes and exclamations that are united more by appeal to emotion than
by rigorous logic.
The figure of the poet himself, however, is the element that unifies Rutebeuf’s works.
Identified by a signature pun as Rustebeuf qui rudement œvre (“Rutebeuf who works
crudely”), the persona of the poet is protagonist in many of his moral, political, and
comic pieces: “Rutebeuf’ is the pilgrim in the allegorical Voie de paradis; he is the
character who goes to Rome in a dream vision to hear news of the election of Pope Urban
IV (Dit d’Hypocrisie, 1261). It is in his own name that Rutebeuf accuses church prelates
of caring less for the Crusades than for “good wine, good meat, and that the pepper be
strong” (Complainte d’Outremer, 11. 94–95). It is he who witnesses the chaste speech of
Alphonse of Poitiers in his eulogy and who is called to judge the comic debate between
Charlot and the barber.
Characterization of his poetic persona is most vividly developed in Rutebeuf’s best-
known works, his ten poems of personal misfortune. His poetic “I” is based on the
conventional character type of the poor fool that figures in medieval request verse by
Goliards and minstrels and later in the poetry of Eustache Deschamps and François
Villon. Picturesquely personal rather than autobiographical in content, his poems of
misfortune dramatize an exaggerated, grotesque self, deserted by friends, grimacing with
cold and want, and martyred by marriage and a weakness for gambling. In the plaintive
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