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Joan H. Levin
RUTEBEUF (fl. 1248–85)
The Parisian Rutebeuf composed works in a greater
variety of genres than any other medieval poet. Known
from a dozen manuscripts, his fi fty-fi ve extant pieces
illustrate the range of medieval urban poetry. Rutebeuf
composed in every vernacular genre except those
especially cultivated in the provincial courts of 13th-
century France: chivalric epics, romances, and songs of
courtly love. At a time when manuscript compilations
grouped lyric, dramatic, and narrative pieces separately,
Rutebeuf, like his contemporary Adam de la Halle,
imposed such a vivid and coherent poetic identity on
all his compositions that they were gathered as a corpus
in three contemporary compilations. Unlike the vaga-
bond Goliards or jongleurs who traveled from castle to
court, Rutebeuf remained in Paris, where he wrote to
please many patrons—the royal family, the university,
the higher clergy, the papal legate—and to amuse a
public in city streets and taverns. While the aristocratic
provincial courts were attuned to the refi ned art of the
chanson and the idealizing fantasies of Arthurian ro-
mance, Rutebeuf’s heterogeneous urban public relished
topical works that spoke to issues of the day, such as
the Crusades and the proliferation of mendicant orders
in Paris. Rutebeuf’s political verse follows historical
events closely and presupposes familiarity with Parisian
topography, personalities, and issues. The notable vari-
ety of genres and the historical content that characterize
Rutebeuf’s poetry are inseparable from Paris, the city
that was its essential and nurturing environment, and
from the colorful fi gure of the poet himself.
Although no document preserves any record of
Rutebeuf’s life, his poems reveal much about his back-
ground, training, and relations with patrons. He may
have come from the region of Champagne; his earliest
polemical poem, the Dit des Cordeliers (1249), favors
the rights of Franciscan monks in Troyes. Throughout
his career, Rutebeuf composed eulogies of nobles from
Champagne, although mostly in connection with his role
as a Parisian propagandist of papal crusade policy, as in
his complaintes for Count Eudes de Nevers (1266) and
Count Thibaut V of Champagne (1279). Rutebeuf’s Vie
de sainte Elysabel (ca. 1271) was commissioned for Isa-
belle, daughter of King Louis IX and wife of Thibaut V.
Rutebeuf’s most prominent benefactors were members
of the royal family, such as Alphonse of Poitiers, brother
of Louis IX, whom he addresses in his request 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 ren-
dezvous with the priest is a devotional exercise (Dame
qui fi st 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 suffi cient 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 philosophi-
cal and scientifi c concepts like his contemporary Jean
de Meun, he draws on Latin sources for his saints’
lives, miracles, polemical poems, and requests forRUTEBEUF