or ironic tones of the Dit d’Aristote, the Paix de Rutebeuf, and De Brichemer, the poet
reminds his patrons of the virtue of largesse and prompt payment. The Repentance
Rutebeuf gives a solemn subjective resonance to the conventional poetry of remorse
found in his saints’ lives and miracles. Furthermore, in his Griesche d’hiver, Griesche
d’été and Dit des ribauds de Grève, Rutebeuf shows the reader a social world excluded
from courtly song, romance, and epic, that of a homeless urban proletariat, stung by white
snowflakes in winter and by black flies in summer.
Appreciatively collected by contemporaries, Rutebeuf’s poetry was forgotten after his
time. But in his works we discover a poetic voice that dramatizes and particularizes the
subjective lyric while it speaks with satirical wit and ethical fervor about concerns of the
urban world of medieval France.
Nancy F.Regalado
Rutebeuf. Œuvres completes de Rutebeuf, ed. Edmond Faral and Julia Bastin. 2 vols. Paris: Picard,
1959.
——. Œuvres completes, ed. and trans. Michel Zink. 2 vols. Paris: Bordas, 1989–90.
Cerquiglini, Jacqueline. “‘Le clerc et le louche’: Sociology of an Esthetic.” Poetics Today
5(1984):479–91.
Huot, Sylvia. From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical
Narrative Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987, pp. 213–19.
Regalado, Nancy Freeman. Poetic Patterns in Rutebeuf: A Study in Noncourtly Poetic Modes of the
Thirteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.
Rousse, Michel. “Le mariage Rutebeuf et la fête des fous.” Moyen âge 88(1982):435–49.
Zink, Michel. ‘Time and Representation of the Self in Thirteenth-Century French Poetry.” Poetics
Today 5(1984): 611–27.
——. “La subjectivité littéraire autour du siècle de saint Louis. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1985, pp. 47–74.
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