listing her attributes in a classic example of amplificatio. Then are listed her companions,
both allegorical and historical villains, followed by an enumeration of the afflictions of
the people, “et tant exploitèrent de détestables et excécrables faix que l’hystoire au loing
récitée donroit piteuses lermes aux yeulx des escoutans.” These two typical examples
deploy rhetoric to convey a political message rather than to shore up political hierarchies.
The use of allegory reveals similar subtlety. Traditionally, scholars have stressed the
indebtedness of the Grands Rhétoriqueurs to the allegory of the Roman de la Rose, but
this conclusion seems premature. In Meschinot’s Lunettes des princes, a work typical of
the Grands Rhétoriqueurs, Reason appears to the author in a dream. After he addresses
Reason, she recollects her thoughts, which had been devastated by Despair, “Lors elle
entra dans son endendement,/Qui vuyde estoit et pillé grandement/Par Désespoir.” There,
she finds only the bread of faith. Meschinot’s somber Reason is a far cry from Jean de
Meun’s Reason, who had expatiated on the ambiguity of language. This difference,
moreover, must be stressed in light of the Grands Rhétoriqueurs’ frequent exploitation of
linguistic ambiguity itself.
A prime example of how ambiguity was manipulated for moralizing ends is found in
Octavien de Saint-Gelays’s Epistre en équivoques, au roy Charles (1493). Homophonic
rhymes bring out a political message as unambiguous as the sounds themselves are the
opposite:
Pour contempler vostre immense justice,
Faites, pour Dieu, que le fleuve juste ysse
Çà bas sur nous, vos trèshumbles subjectz!
Tenuz nous ont, ainsi qu’oiseaulx sus getz,
Division, simes, discorde, envye:Remettez nous, noble seigneur, en vye!
This interest in linguistic play can be traced back to the fabliaux, and Molinet, for
example, composed an entire ballade whose rhymes are exclusively based on -vis/t, -
cu(l), and—c/çon. The Art et science de rhétorique vulgaire (1524–25) provides
examples of double and triple verbal ambiguities.
Perhaps due to their penchant for moralizing, the Grands Rhétoriqueurs did not
celebrate chivalric ritual and convention with the wholehearted endorsement of Olivier de
La Marche, their contemporary at the court of Burgundy. Generally silent on explicitly
political topics, they tend to side implicitly with the Burgundian position in the struggle
between Louis XI and Charles the Bold. The condemnation of the ravages of war, as
found in the Ressource du petitpeuple, for example, makes its point allusively. By
comparison, when Jean Lemaire de Belges celebrates the advantages of French over
Italian, his “patriotism” remains largely literary and is not transferred to the French royal
house that was invading northern Italy at the time.
Among lyrical genres, the Grands Rhétoriqueurs particularly cultivated funeral
laments, whose models were the elegy and planctus. They do not stress the same subjects
as the contemporary and widely popular danse macabre. Crétin’s Translation du chant de
misere, for example, points out that rhetoric has never saved its practictioners from death:
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